Princeton Review Nailed for NCLB Tutoring Fraud

If there are any educational historians around in a hundred years to examine the records from this generation of corporate reform efforts to privateer public schools into corporate revenue streams, No Child Left Behind will stand out, no doubt, as one of the most useful tools in their arsenal.  To those less disposed to celebrate the demise of democratic institutions, NCLB has, thus far anyway, proved itself as the most expensive, toxic, and damaging federal education policy in the nation’s history. 

Based on the ideologically-driven faux science of the National Reading Panel, NCLB created Reading First, which poured $7,000,000,000 into phonics-based direct instruction (parrot learning) reading efforts that set a course for ineffective, unbalanced literacy programs for years to come in the early grades.  The U.S. Dept. of Education’s own study in 2008 tersely concluded that "Reading First did not produce a statistically significant impact on student reading comprehension test scores in grades one, two, or three" (p. xv).  Why? Could it have something to do with the fact that reading instruction was aimed as much at behavioral control as it was reading, and children spent an inordinate amount of time being tested on how many nonsense syllables they could recognize in 60 seconds—something called decoding and DIBELS testing? 

What did children get out that kind of reading-in-a-straightjacket experience? Again from the Federal study: “Reading First produced a positive and statistically significant impact on decoding among first grade students in one school year (spring 2007).  The impact was equivalent to an effect of 0.17 standard deviations” (p. xv).  Not bad for $7 billion.

In another study from ED, the only literacy method that got positive results in all four domains of reading literacy was Reading Recovery, a balanced program that had been demonized as “whole language” and essentially eliminated from consideration by the Reading First officials who were deciding who would get the Reading First grants. 

Another example of waste and fraud occurred when more public billions were allocated for NCLB tutoring, or supplemental services (see here, here, here, and here) with the greatest beneficiaries being the privateer tutoring companies that operated for over five years without any federal oversight or evaluation studies to determine the effect of their overpriced tutoring on student achievement.  When school vouchers were finally stripped out of the NCLB bill prior to passage, advocates of privatization settled for charters and tutoring as the road to more privatization, while hoping for vouchers to be passed in future reauthorizations of NCLB.  Quoting from Elizabeth Debray’s book:

        . . . Senator Gregg saw another advantage to supplemental services.  As one aide who preferred anonymity recalled about the meeting with Republican Senate committee members right before the committee voted: “Gregg was explaining why they should vote for the bill . . . and he said: ‘Well, the supplemental services are a foot under the door for vouchers.  They’re going to show that these schools aren’t working properly, and we’ll finally be able to show that the schools aren’t doing well. The assessments are going to prove the same thing.’”

Supplemental services operated for 5 years without any oversight whatsoever. When they finally got around to it, ED’s own research found that

     —Private providers accounted for 88 percent of all state-approved providers in May 2008, an increase from 60 percent in May 2003.

     —Expenditures for Title I supplemental educational services varied, $192 million to $375 million per year.

     —By 2007, only eight states had databases containing student achievement and participation information that would permit rigorous evaluations of achievement effects of providers on a statewide basis.

So today’s story in the New York Daily News comes as no surprise.  It simply provides another bit of evidence that historians will collect into their massive database that will contain the voluminous records of corruption, deception, thievery, and dehumanization of public education that occurred in our era, all under the bogus banner of accountability and high standards.

Test-prep firm Princeton Review swindled the federal government out of millions by falsely claiming it tutored needy city kids, the Manhattan U.S. attorney charges. 

From 2006 to 2010, Princeton Review was reimbursed for tutoring services that were either faked or inflated, said Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, whose office filed a civil fraud suit Tuesday. 

“The Princeton Review and its employees were supposed to tutor needy students, not cheat a federal program,” said Bharara, who didn’t specify how much money is involved. 

During those years, city education officials paid Princeton Review $38 million for tutoring funded by the federal government under No Child Left Behind, the suit says. 

During that time, Princeton Review staffers submitted phony attendance forms and invoices for thousands of hours of instruction, the suit claims. 

Bharara said staffers changed hundreds of kids’ absent marks to present — in one case falsely signing in a student named Dontae as “Donate.” 

The company billed for sessions with kids who were on vacation and gave some site managers bonuses of up to $9,600 for reporting high daily attendance, the suit says. . . .  
 

More Millions Down the NCLB Tutoring Toilet

Less Public Oversight = More Corruption. The Bloomberg-Klein miracle model continues.

From the Daily News (ht to Monty Neill):

In its drive to improve school reading and math test scores, the city's Department of Education paid a private company more than $21 million in two years to tutor thousands of public school pupils at home.

But most of that money - more than twice the amount the DOE originally budgeted - went for overhead, management and profit for the company, Champion Learning Center.

Champion got $79 an hour to tutor each pupil for up to four hours per week, according to a copy of the contract obtained by the Daily News.

That adds up to almost $320 a week in tutoring costs per child.

Champion paid its part-time tutors, mostly college students with no teaching experience, an average of $17 an hour.

That's right. The company received an astounding $62 in overhead for every hour its employees spent tutoring a child.

Champion is one of dozens of private companies with state approval to provide tutoring services under the No Child Left Behind Act.

"We received very little training in our orientation," said one college student hired by Champion. "They just told us to follow the instructions in the test prep workbooks they gave us." . . . .

Title I Funds to Tutoring Companies Shown Dump Worthy Once More

President Obama today:

What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them — that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply. The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works — whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified. Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end. And those of us who manage the public's dollars will be held to account — to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day — because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government.

From the Detroit Free Press:

. . . ."It's [tutoring] not being taken advantage of by students, those who are taking advantage of it are not showing improvement in test scores, and the providers are not being rigorously monitored," said Jack Jennings, president of the Center for Education Policy, which recently released a nationwide study that found little academic gain from a program nationally. . . .

. . . .The No Child Left Behind law requires that students be offered tutoring, called Supplemental Education Services, paid for with federal Title I dollars, when their schools fail to meet performance standards for three consecutive years. Nationwide, it costs about $2.5 billion.

To gauge the effectiveness of the tutoring in Michigan, the Free Press reviewed fifth-, eighth- and ninth-grade MEAP results for 2005, 2006 and 2007 in selected subjects for schools required to provide tutoring. Among the findings:

• The average increase in fifth-grade students meeting expectations in English at schools where tutoring on the MEAP test was required was 1.7 percenage points, compared to a 2.8 percentage point increase statewide.

• Eighth-grade math showed a 4.7 percentage point bump for schools with tutoring but an 8.4 point increase statewide.

• Ninth-grade social studies saw an average 15.4 percentage point decrease among schools forced to offer tutoring, compared to a 4 point decline statewide.

The tutoring sounds good in theory but is failing in practice, Jennings said. There are no educational requirements for tutors beyond a high school diploma, and nothing to guarantee students are tutored in the areas they need the most help. . . .

NCLB Tutoring Helps Tutoring Companies, Not Poor Kids

When the privatizers shoved a tutoring mandate worth a billion dollars a year into the NCLB Act (to be paid for with Title I allotments) as a way to assuage the conservative loss of vouchers from the Bill, not even critics could have guessed what a waste of education money the corporate tutoring program would become.

From the Washington Post:

By Maria Glod
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, June 13, 2008; B01

Free tutoring that federal law prescribes to help students at struggling schools has yielded little or no positive effect on student test scores in Virginia, Maryland and several other states, according to early evaluations.

Under the six-year-old No Child Left Behind law, certain schools in which too many students fail math or reading exams must use federal funds to offer after-school or weekend tutoring to students from low-income families. In the 2006-07 school year, $595 million went to the fast-growing industry of for-profit and nonprofit tutoring providers. But it remains unclear whether or how much those extra lessons are boosting student performance, even though the law envisions them as a key way to narrow achievement gaps.

In Virginia, researchers compared the performance last year of students with identical or very similar math scores in 2006 and found that those who were tutored did no better than their peers, according to an analysis the state Department of Education released in April. In a similar comparison of reading scores, students who were tutored lagged behind those who weren't.

Studies in Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, Michigan and Kentucky also showed that the mandated tutoring, known as "supplemental educational services," didn't bump up test scores.

"This isn't helping poor kids," said Jack Jennings, president and chief executive of the Center on Education Policy in the District, which monitors implementation of the federal law. "All it's doing is taking money out of classrooms and putting it into the hands of private companies." . . .

Struggling Schools Face Sanctions as Private Tutoring Companies Reap Bonanza

If favored educational publishers are excited about the billion dollars of Reading First money pouring from the US DOE coffers each year, then double that yearly allocation and imagine how thrilled tutoring company execs must be with their target set on the $2 billion a year jackpot awaiting them as a result of NCLB tutoring (supplemental services) requirements for students of failing schools.

The tutoring requirement became the late-inning replacement for the favored privatization pitch, school vouchers, that was pulled from NCLB in the late stages of the negotiations that eventually assured passage in 2001. Privatization would have to take a more subtle route, embedded in the increasingly-draconian sanctions that would result from impossible test performance demands over time. In the meantime, the best that could be arranged for the eager education industry was a massive giveaway in the form of tutoring contracts to private ventures that have sprung up since NCLB passage.

Unlike the strict oversight of schools receiving federal funds to stringently implement the renewed phonics orthodoxy pushed by Reading First, there are no federal accountability enforcement measures for the companies who are now collecting the carloads of cash from NCLB's tutoring program.

And carloads there are. The Baltimore Sun reports that a local company, Educate, Inc. saw profits jump 402% in 2004, as more and more urban schools failed to meet their mandated testing targets for the third year, thus requiring these schools to set aside up to 20% of their Federal Title I funds to pay tutoring companies to tutor students who request extra help.

In a recent study conducted by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) and the American Institute for Social Justice, researchers found that Louisiana is the only state that monitors the effects of the private tutoring services on test score performance. The study, which examined 91 separate districts, found that $300 million was paid to tutoring companies in one year “with almost no scientific evidence that this spending has contributed to academic achievement."

As the draining of Title I funds continues, The Center for Policy Alternatives reports these interesting facts, some of which are from the same study cited above:

Of the 1,000 tutoring providers on current state approval lists, 63 percent are private companies. In future years, the market for in-school services by for-profit companies is estimated to be $20 to $30 billion. One of the biggest tutoring companies, Sylvan Education Solutions, expected to tutor 20,000 students in 2004, at $20 to $40 an hour. Some companies try to take unfair advantage. In one case in North Carolina, a tutoring company submitted an invoice for providing 48 students a total of 56 hours of instruction at a cost of $37,455—a rate of $674 an hour.

It would seem, then, that NCLB's impossible demands that are advertised as accountability, and the draconian sanctions that are offered as remedies, really only apply to those public institutions that are in need of extremist makeovers or outright replacement. Left immune from these relentless bare-knuckled policies are those who are sure to profit from the resulting carnage.