By Peter Downs
Filed Sunday, October 23 at 10:12 PM
St. Louis School Board member Bill Purdy called the program "a national scandal" and "a travesty" and refused to vote for it at the school board meeting on October 11. Fellow school board member Ron Jackson replied that while much of what Purdy said was true, "we have to vote for it anyway." Jackson did, and so did four of the other six school board members.
The "it" in question is the "supplemental education services (SES)" component of the federal No Child Left Behind law, under which school districts are required to offer children in certain low-performing schools the option of going to a private company for after-school tutoring.
Lynn Spampinato, the chief academic officer of St. Louis Public Schools, had requested the vote on offering the tutoring services to St. Louis public school students. She said that the federal law requires that the district spend 20% of the funds it receives for disadvantaged students, known as Title 1 funds, on SES. This year, the school district can provide tutoring itself, "but for us to do it we have to give parents the option of choosing from every SES provider approved by the State," she said. There are 30 other tutoring providers approved by the State beside the St. Louis Public Schools.
Spampinato also lamented the "serious flaws" in the law. She said there was so little accountability of the private companies offering tutoring that "if they tell us they tutored a student, we have to pay them the full amount," even if the company really only saw the student once. The state-mandated payment in Missouri for tutoring is $1,541 for each student. "We can't even verify attendance," she said.
Perhaps she exaggerated.
On June 13, 2005, the U.S. Department of Education issued new instructions to states and school districts in the for of a "Non-Regulatory Guidance," as Education Secretary Margaret Spelling announced a new "common sense approach" to implementing No Child Left Behind.
Under the new instructions, school districts can regulate private tutoring companies through contracts. Those contracts, according to the Department of Education, can specify achievement goals for each student the company tutors [Section 1116(e)(3)(A)], tests for measuring achievement [Section 1116(e)(3)(A) and (B)], reduced payment if the student misses sessions [Section 1116(e)(3)(D)], and a clause for terminating the contract if the student does not progress to the goals in the time specified [Section 1116(e)(3)(C)]. The section numbers reference sections of No Child Left Behind.
According to Patty Sullivan, director of the Center for Education Policy, most school districts already provider attendance claims. She said Spampinato's claim that the St. Louis school district does not have the right to do that is "very unusual."
As for measuring the effectiveness of a provider's tutoring, the Department of Education instructs school districts that, "The best practice would be to specify, in the contract between the LEA [the local education agency] and the provider, the assessment or assessments that will be used."
States also were given more room to regulate tutoring companies in June. According to the Department of Education, state boards of education: "have a responsibility, through the approval and monitoring processes, to ensure that high-quality services are delivered. . . . Specifically, [they] must develop and implement standards and techniques for monitoring the quality, performance, and effectiveness of the services offered by approved supplemental educational service providers. Such standards and techniques, as well as any findings resulting from such monitoring, must be publicly reported."
State education departments, according to the feds, "must ensure that each provider it approves:
1. Has a demonstrated record of effectiveness in increasing student academic achievement [Section 1116(e)(12)(B)(i)];
2. Will use instructional strategies that are high quality, based upon research, and designed to increase student academic achievement. . . [Section 1116(e)(12)(C)];
3. Provides services that are consistent with the instructional program of the [local school district] and with State academic content and achievement standards. . . [Sections 11116(e)(5)(B) and 1116(e)(12)(B)(ii)]. . ."
Before June 13, 2005, however, Spampinato's comments might have been right on the mark. The SES provision of the federal No Child Left Behind act essentially set up a national voucher system for tutoring –– one without regulation or accountability, much like the school voucher or private school scholarship plans that have been proposed in the state legislature.
The first draft of regulations from the Department of Education would have prohibited states and school districts from exercising any oversight over tutoring services. States were prohibited from setting a minimum standard for tutor qualifications, and prohibited from requiring some evidence that a tutoring service worked. The Education Department justified its prohibition on state accountability requirements by stating such requirements would limit the choices parents could have.
After fierce lobbying from educators and state education officials, the final regulations still prohibited any regulation of tutor qualifications, but they did let state officials ask tutoring services to document that their programs are based on scientific research.
John Jennings, president and chief executive officer of the CEP, looked at the lax regulation of supplemental education services and the huge sums of money involved – $2 billion nationwide – and called it "an area with tremendous potential for fraud." Sullivan, director of the CEP, said that events have proved him right.
Sullivan said, "the deputy commissioner of education in Washington State has complained of private tutoring companies wining and dining school superintendents." Federal law lets school districts recommend to parents which tutoring service they should use.
In Clark County, Nevada, private tutoring services went door-to-door to sign up students for SES services, with one company even offering a free TiVo to every student who signed up.
And, in order to get the maximum profit out of the program, some online tutoring companies set up their tutoring centers in India, paying workers about $1 an hour to tutor U.S. students over the internet.
Amidst the chaos, some school district officials decided to take action even if the feds seemed to oppose it. Philadelphia Public Schools canceled its contract with one tutoring company after one of that company's tutors raped a student.
However, the biggest challenge to the federal government's "anything goes" policy erupted last year in Chicago.
In mid-March, Chicago Public Schools expelled Platform Learning from seven Chicago schools over persistent complaints that tutors did not show up and there were insufficient materials for the number of children enrolled in the tutoring classes.
Ten weeks earlier, the U.S. Department of Education had ordered Chicago Public Schools to stop its own tutoring program, but the district had refused. Besides its own tutoring program, Chicago Public Schools offered eligible students 28 other programs to pick from.
In both cases, the Illinois education department sided with Chicago against the federal government, and the state even gave the school district funding for tutoring after the feds said it could not use federal money.
Spurred on by the controversies in Chicago, the Illinois State Board of Education prepared new rules governing tutoring companies in public schools. The new rules included better monitoring of tutoring services through data collection and site visits, and new financial reporting requirements to ensure that tutoring companies do not charge districts more than their actual costs for services.
Three days before the Illinois board of education adopted the rules, and potentially set the stage for a stand-off with the federal government, the federal education department released the new guidance that gave states and school districts more oversight of tutoring programs. Since then, the feds also issued new rules to give school districts more leeway to offer their own tutoring services to students, and accepted Chicago's program.
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