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May 22, 2006

The tutoring truth

Eugene Hickok, former deputy secretary of education under Rod Paige, criticizes local schools and school districts for not signing up more students for free tutoring under No Child Left Behind. In this column in the Washington Post, Hickok, now a lobbyist for a coalition of private tutoring companies that provide services under NCLB, bemoaned the fact that only 17 percent of the 1.4 million eligible students participated in tutoring last year. The reasons? Hickok blamed school district officials for not notifying parents in a timely manner and for discouraging them from signing up their children with letters full of jargon.

There is always room for improvement when it comes to administering tutoring under NCLB. But, as BoardBuzz has pointed out before, the reality is more than what Hickok described. Tutoring participation has increased from 7 percent to 17 percent. While 17 percent of 1.4 million students may sound low, here's the deal. The current criteria make all low-income students attending a school that is not making AYP eligible for tutoring regardless of their performance. In reality, however, school districts do not have sufficient set-aside funds to serve most eligible students. The current eligiblity criteria therefore create a situation in which districts will never be able to serve all or most eligible students. See this NSBA report. A case study conducted by the U.S. Department of Education in 2005 found that many districts were able to serve only a low percentage of eligible students with the maximum amount of set-aside funds.

Posted May 22, 2006 1:00 PM | No Child Left Behind

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Comments(1)

Posted by: Michael Martin on May 26, 2006 6:09 PM

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune had an April 27, 2006, story titled "Tutoring didn't pay off in city, analysis finds" that said a Sylvan Learning tutoring program was paid $1.7 million last year but a comparison of 569 tutored students to a matched set of untutored students "found no statistically significant differences in reading gains made by the two groups."

I have a hard-copy of this story but I couldn't find it on the Star Tribune website.