October 2025 Newsletter
FALL NEWS FROM THE PUTTKAMMER CENTER FOR EDUCATIONAL JUSTICE
Dear Friends:
The Petey Greene Program tutors make a difference in the educational journeys of more than 2000 students a year. But how much of a difference? How many tutoring sessions does it take to go from failing to passing the GED? How much do students progress, on average, over the course of one tutoring session? These questions are crucial to shape tutoring programs, at the PGP and more broadly in the field of education in prison. And for the first time in years, we have some answers, thanks to a Puttkammer Center review of the PGP students’ academic outcomes. While far from definitive, these results will guide our work moving forward, within and beyond our footprint…including in a new state. In fact, the PGP tutors will soon reach incarcerated students in North Carolina, expanding our geographic reach for the first time since 2018 thanks to a pilot program in partnership with the Justice Lab at Duke University. As always, our work builds on the knowledge and experience of system-impaired scholars, and I’m excited that a new working group on learning communities, research, and co-creation will enable us to advance a national conversation about how to engage incarcerated scholars in research and teaching, while compensating them for their labor. These three developments embody the mission of the Puttkammer Center for Educational Justice: to build coalitions across the field of education in prison, and to combine research and program development with the goal of creating scalable, evidence-based solutions that have a measurable impact on the academic achievement and confidence of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated students.
With gratitude,
Chiara Benetollo
Executive Director of the Puttkammer Center for Educational Justice
Justice Education Seminar Webinar Youth & Families Facing Incarceration
Mellon Foundation Awards Grant to Expand Inside Tutor Program
We're excited to announce that the Puttkammer Center for Educational Justice has received a three-year grant from The Mellon Foundation to develop and scale our Inside Tutor training program. Through this grant, we'll replicate the program in five correctional facilities, training incarcerated scholars to support fellow students enrolled in liberal arts and humanities higher education programs. This initiative will foster self-organized learning communities within carceral facilities and expand access to quality liberal arts education. The project will culminate in a publicly available white paper and Inside Tutor Toolkit to share our findings and support broader implementation of this evidence-based model across the field.
Announcing Our New Working Group
Starting this month, the Puttkammer Center is convening a working group on learning communities, research, and curricular co-creation in carceral spaces. Participants, selected among more than a hundred applicants across the country, include formerly incarcerated scholars, faculty from higher education in prison programs, and representatives from community-based organizations—all joined by a commitment to meaningfully engage incarcerated scholars in teaching and knowledge creation and to ensure that they are compensated for their labor. This working group will serve as a catalyst for national conversations that have the potential to transform education in prison, helping to shape models that center the voices and expertise of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people. Stay tuned for research and reports from this group.
We’re Expanding to North Carolina
We are growing! The Puttkammer Center is leading the expansion of the Petey Greene Program to a new state, North Carolina. Through a partnership with the Justice Lab at Duke University, we will pilot a GED tutoring program in two correctional facilities, while exploring opportunities to serve additional sites across the state
Preliminary Data Confirms, Tutoring Boosts Academic Success
Research has long shown that individualized tutoring is one of the most effective ways to boost academic success, particularly for marginalized and first-generation students—but access to such support remains limited in carceral and reentry education. Our work is helping to close this gap, providing quality education while tracking both qualitative and quantitative outcomes. A recent analysis of the academic outcomes of students across four PGP programs found that participants improved an average of three points per semester, or roughly 0.3 points per tutoring hour, a meaningful gain given that many students begin just below the passing threshold. These findings suggest that even modest increases in tutoring access can have a significant impact on student success, particularly when instruction is intensive and consistent, underscoring the importance of expanding individualized learning opportunities in carceral classrooms. To learn more about this analysis, check out our recent blog post.
Spread the Word: Conferences & Webinars
COABE hosted a webinar on Furthering Organizational Capacity and Evaluation Readiness, featuring Puttkammer Center staff alongside our partners RTI International. RTI’s evaluability assessment of the PGP’s College Bridge and college tutoring program served as a case study to discuss how can organizations prepare for formal evaluations of their impact.
The Puttkammer Center and RTI International will join forces again to discuss their collaboration at the conference of the American Criminological Society on November 13. We look forward to seeing you there!