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. . . .

Kaplan Gets Fat on School Money for Poor Kids

The flood of federal, state, and local education dollars into the coffers of corporations like Kaplan, Newton Learning, and Princeton Review remains unchecked, even though there is no evidence, scientifically based or otherwise, that these corporate interventions are doing any good for anything other than corporate bottom lines. In fact, there is growing evidence from insider accounts like this one in the September Harper's that the the spread of Kaplan's influence into scripted curriculum writing is further undercutting efforts to bring real teaching and learning to urban students who are being left further behind as corporate bosses get richer on money intended for education--not exploitation.

Here are a couple of pertinent clips from this excellent piece by Jeremy Miller:

. . . .In New York City, Kaplan provides NCLB- mandated tutoring for the high school Regents exams and the subject exams administered to students in the third through eighth grades.) Many educators argue that the gains from prep courses are negligible and the programs themselves ultimately harmful, since they drain precious funds and class time. A recent Chicago Public Schools study examining student performance on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills found “little difference between tutored students and those who were eligible but did not receive tutoring.” The price tag for supplemental tutoring in Chicago, which 60,000 students received in the 2004–2005 school year: $50 million. Teachers also are aware that Kaplan’s presence will continue to be felt long after its coaches have moved on: completion of the thirty-six-lesson SAT Advantage program, which includes three abbreviated tests and one full-length practice exam, requires a full forty hours of instruction time.
. . . .

Although hailed by its advocates as a step toward institutional accountability and full student proficiency, No Child Left Behind is, at its core, a highly punitive act. Ratified in 2002, the legislation mandates that states create a system of tests and other academic indicators that measure whether students meet “the minimum level of proficiency.” Schools that repeatedly fail to meet these benchmarks can be closed, taken over by private corporations, or restructured. Schools with high-poverty populations that receive federal aid (known as Title I funds) and fail for three straight years to demonstrate “progress” toward full proficiency are required to spend up to 20 percent of this federal money on tutoring or transportation costs for students who choose to transfer out of their current school. In New York City, the transfer option is derided by critics as a hollow provision, since other city schools generally are no better and successful ones are already oversubscribed.

Thus, failing students become trapped in a foundering system, and the schools where students land en masse are left to carry out the test-heavy requirements of NCLB. For the New York schools “in need of improvement,” this means preparing students—many of whom are utterly lacking in basic academic skills and subject knowledge—to pass a battery of standardized exams. Toward this end, it also means paying money to outside entities (often private companies such as Kaplan, the Princeton Review, and Newton Learning) up to $2,000 per student for courses focused not on improving content knowledge or on intensive educational counseling but on strategies for a “particular testing task.” (The total annual government expenditure per student in New York City is $15,000.)

The failure of schools serving low-income students has been a windfall for the testing industry. Title I funds earmarked for test tutoring increased by 45 percent during the first four years of NCLB, from $1.75 billion in 2001 to $2.55 billion in 2005. With the ever growing stream of funding flowing through the nation’s schools, the number of supplemental-service providers nationwide has exploded. In New York City, the number of providers approved by the state’s department of education jumped from forty-seven in 2002–2003, the first full school year of NCLB, to 202 today. To capitalize on these new revenue opportunities, Kaplan has acquired Achieva, a provider of online course materials to schools, and SpellRead, a national “reading-intervention” company. In 2003, Kaplan hired former N.Y.C. Chancellor of Education Harold Levy as an executive vice president and general counsel, and in 2006 relocated its headquarters for Kaplan K12, the division of the company that works in schools, from Midtown Manhattan to luxury offices downtown. According to Crain’s, the company made the move “to be closer to the New York City Department of Education.”

Not wanting to be limited in its offerings to schools, Kaplan recently entered the business of selling content-based lesson plans. Although the shift from testing strategies to classroom content is a departure for Kaplan, the company sees little difference between the two. Earlier this spring, I designed a genetics class for Kaplan’s “Lesson Bank,” an online repository of short lessons that, for a fee, teachers can download in PDF form. As writers of the curriculum, we were repeatedly told that the materials had to provide hassle-free prep for teachers. When I submitted a first draft of a high school lesson on Mendelian genetics, the Kaplan staffer overseeing production, Tyler DeWitt, told me it was too complex. “We’re really trying to almost script lessons,” DeWitt wrote via email, “so that teachers who may be new or not the greatest (or smartest) teachers in the world can follow the ‘script’ and still give a great lesson.” For $35 an hour, I obliged and watered down the material, removing all “advanced” content points, such as co-dominance and pleiotropy (though these were subjects that I covered in the basic biology classes I taught a couple of years earlier).

Kaplan’s increased workload has produced some remarkable results, though not necessarily in the classroom. The company’s revenues have jumped from $354 million in 2000 to more than $2 billion today, and it is now the most profitable subsidiary of its parent, The Washington Post Company, accounting for almost half of the conglomerate’s income. More telling are the margins: in 2003, Kaplan posted a loss of $11.7 million; in 2007, the company reported a $149 million profit. . . .

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." . . .

Supplemental Educational Services = Complementary Corporate Income

Madison Avenue would never launch a new product line without extensive research to stand on, and the Dept. of Ed would never consider a federal grant request with no data on effectiveness or ANY PLAN to collect data on effectiveness. Such pragmatic considerations, however, have never stopped the reckless and wasteful practices of this Department of Education--they simply don't care for the niceties of protocol, or even law.

When the school voucher provisions were extracted the final time from the NCLB bill in the Spring of 2001, the corporate tutoring giveaway was quickly offered up as the big greasy sop to the right wing. Now billions of diverted dollars later, it is another prime example of BushCo. squandering of the public trust.

From the Civil Rights Project:

THE CIVIL RIGHTS PROJECT/PROYECTO DERECHOS CIVILES, UCLA releases a policy brief on NCLB’s Supplemental Educational Services.

Los Angeles, CA—October 30, 2007—The supplemental educational services (SES) provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act promise to expand educational opportunities by providing low-income families access to the private tutoring market. In this policy brief, the Civil Rights Project at UCLA reviewed data on participation in the program and found that demand for SES has either declined or leveled off after five years. This comes as the number of students eligible for services has increased.

This brief examines trends in the implementation of the NCLB supplemental educational services program over five years (2002-03 to 2006-07) in eleven districts located in six states.

These data show that demand for supplemental educational services has either declined or leveled off after five years. This has come as federal funds allocated for SES increased and as more students have become eligible to receive services. The increase in the absolute
number of students enrolled in SES is related to more schools identified for improvement, and thus, more students eligible to receive services. What is striking is that the increase in the number of eligible students has not translated into an increased demand for SES.

According to Civil Right Project researcher, Gail Sunderman, these findings suggest that the SES market may not work for low-income and minority families as envisioned. “This program was adopted without any prior research on how it might work or whether the intended beneficiaries would participate.” She added that research on supplemental programs suggests that programs that work best are part of a comprehensive approach to school reform rather than an add-on such as SES.

This brief will also be useful to anyone seeking to understand how the SES program is designed and implemented. It providers answers to questions about the SES requirements and examines both the supply and demand side of the SES market.

The policy brief can be found at www.civilrightsproject.ucla.edu.

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.