The Most Equitable Tutoring Tool This District Has Used

Oxnard Union Reaches the Students Traditional Tutoring Never Did

Before- and after-school tutoring kept serving the district's highest achievers. By making support available on students' own terms, Oxnard Union extended intervention to the students in the middle who never asked for help.

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Background

In spring 2026, Oxnard Union High School District sat down to decide how much of its budget should go to a homework center. It was a significant commitment, and Daniel Cook, the district's Learning and Instruction Technology Coach, had run the analysis that mattered most. Not whether tutoring works, but who actually shows up for it.

The answer was the same one the district had found every previous time it asked: Across before-school, lunch, and after-school programs, the students walking through the door were largely the ones already succeeding. As Cook puts it, the profile of a student at in-person tutoring is typically the 3.5 GPA and above student in an AP class trying to move an A-minus to an A. The students the district most wanted to reach were not in the room.

That question sits underneath everything Oxnard Union has built with Khan Academy. The district serves roughly 16,000 students across nine schools in Ventura County. As a high-school-only district, it receives students from more than a dozen partner elementary districts, each arriving with a different set of academic assets and gaps, and Oxnard has four years to close them while preparing students for college, career, dual enrollment, and a growing AP and CTE program.

The district became an early adopter of Khan Academy and Khanmigo at Adolfo Camarillo High School, piloting intervention models at a moment when post-COVID funding made experimentation possible. The goal was never to add a tool. It was to answer a question the district kept trying to solve: how do you get support to the students who need it but will not ask for it?

Challenges

• Traditional intervention reached the wrong students. Repeated access analyses of before-school, lunch, and after-school tutoring found that the students showing up were largely those already achieving at a 3.5 GPA or above.
• Scheduling made seat-time intervention structurally impossible for many. At some campuses, more than 55-60% of students participate in athletics. 
• Students in the middle went unidentified. Teenagers, as Cook notes, are not especially apt to announce that they need help.
• Graduating is not the same as being college-eligible. California's public universities require a specific sequence of high school courses, known as A-G, passed with a C or better. Oxnard graduates more than 93% of its students, but only 45% complete A-G, which means the rest leave high school unable to apply to a University of California or Cal State campus. The district has posted large gains on A-G, but is eager to keep pace with the graduation rate.
• Though math D/F rates improved, ELA outcomes were static. 
• Tool sprawl taxed teachers and students alike. Every added login, portal, and click reduced follow-through, and budgets were finite.
• Replacing a tool is not simply a budget decision. California ed code governs curriculum adoption, and subscriptions adjacent to curriculum must go through a formal process, making consolidation slower and more deliberate than a purchasing choice.
• The district needed an AI policy that did two things at once: introduce students to AI, particularly first-generation students who are not encountering it at home, and protect them from its harms.

What They Did

• Made support available without asking. Oxnard positioned Khanmigo as always-available, judgment-free help, removing the social cost of admitting you are behind. As Cook puts it, students vote with their feet, and the usage data shows who is actually being reached.

"Traditional tutoring programs tend to serve our highest-achieving students. Khanmigo is different: it invites all student into support." - Daniel Cook, Learning and Instructional Technology Coach, Oxnard Union High School District

• Embedded Khanmigo in the peer tutorial model. Adolfo Camarillo High School runs a strong AVID program, a college-readiness model that has historically focused on first-generation students, though Camarillo's has since grown well beyond that original scope. AVID's tutorial structure puts students together in small groups to work through problems collaboratively, and those groups now use Khanmigo rather than falling back on Google or their notes. Students fill each other's gaps with guardrails in place, and the interaction data returns to teachers, replacing a Google Form and making each session more targeted.
• Started the AI conversation early. The guardrail questions districts across California are asking now (how do you leverage it, how do you prevent abuse, what protections are in place) are ones Oxnard worked through with the Khan Academy team two years earlier, which put the district ahead of its peers as it moved into formal AI policy adoption.
• Joined the ELA diagnostic pilot. With math improving and ELA static, Oxnard entered Khan Academy's ELA assessment pilot across multiple sites, including its middle college, running pre-, mid-, and post-assessments.
• Pushed the Khan Academy team toward subgroup visibility. Oxnard asked the Khan Academy team to surface data by student group, including reclassified fluent English proficient students, English learners, and long-term English learners, rather than aggregate performance alone, and worked through the data-sharing agreement changes needed to make it possible.

"Partnering with the research team and asking those questions, instead of just buying a product and putting it in front of kids, being part of the conversation around it, that has been really amazing." - Daniel Cook

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• Consolidated the edtech stack. Drawing on years of research into cognitive lift and course design, the district deliberately reduced the number of tools teachers and students must navigate, on the principle that every additional click makes follow-through less likely. Khan Academy absorbed AP prep coursework that previously required a separate subscription.
• Fed mastery evidence into Portrait of a Learner. Oxnard is building a student-facing web app that surfaces assets rather than deficits: college and career readiness, California's State Seals of Biliteracy and Civic Engagement (formal recognitions that appear on a student's diploma), and Khan Academy mastery data as evidence of what students actually know, independent of inconsistent grading. AVID teachers pair Khan Academy's college readiness content, including financial literacy, with the California College Guidance Initiative, on the view that understanding the finances of college is the single biggest hurdle their students face.

District-Reported Results

• Del Sol's active learners average about 70 skills to proficient, above the 60-skill threshold Khan Academy's mastery research associates with meaningful gains on standardized assessments.
• Adolfo Camarillo High School earned AVID model school recognition, a designation with a defined set of metrics behind it, and now serves as the model for AVID practice across the district.
• Teacher culture shifted from data resistance to data demand. Teachers are now requesting student progress data rather than being handed it.

I work in data, and I usually feel like I'm force-feeding teachers data. Now they're asking me for it. That's a substantial cultural change in and of itself." - Daniel Cook

• Oxnard has become a reference point for peer districts navigating AI adoption, and now advises them on responsible implementation.

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