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April 4, 2005

Tutoring bonanza

More news media are picking up on the issues with private supplemental educational services (SES) under No Child Left Behind (NCLB) that BoardBuzz has noted before. See this New York Times piece by Susan Saulny. The promise of NCLB money—and the knowledge that more SES spending will kick in as more and more schools fail to reach the rising NCLB bar—has spawned hundreds of new tutoring providers hoping to cash in. In addition to the quality and cost concerns, some observers are decrying over-the-top marketing tactics by providers.

One big issue is whether NCLB provides enough assurance that SES programs actually help students succeed. There's nothing in NCLB that requires adequate yearly progress (AYP) by tutoring services, and school districts are given very little say in the matter. The Kafkaesque reality is that the more kids keep failing tests, the more SES is mandated. A federal spokesman recently assured a business gathering of tutoring company officials that, "We want as little regulation as possible so the market can be as vibrant as possible."

And indeed, the feds have been pretty aggressive in looking out for the private providers, with an alacrity that is breathtaking when one compares their response time to concerns raised by school districts. For details and other developments on the SES front, check out this recent item from NSBA's Legal Clips, which summarizes Catherine Gewertz's Ed Week article and highlights NSBA's legislative proposals to improve the accountability and workability of NCLB's SES rules.

All this is not to say that private SES providers can't make a great contribution to learning. There are high quality programs out there, including some of the for-profit ones. As in Philadelphia, the feds don't always side 100 percent with the SES providers. And to be fair, some districts have struggled to get more students to take advantage of the opportunity for additional learning, so some degree of marketing hype is to be expected, even by school officials.

But watch out for Accountability Schizophrenia on this one as well. Just like with vouchers and charter schools, there are some voices out there in Policyland who talk a good game on accountability as long as they're referring to public schools, but who change personalities pretty dramatically when it comes holding private entities to the same high standards for the use of your tax dollars.

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Can school boards ban sex offenders from their construction contractors?

All kinds of important stuff faced by the school board in Pinellas County, Fla. On the surface: How to adjust construction oversight policies fast enough to keep up with so many new building projects. Below the surface: Can a school district maintain a policy that says no sex offenders may work on any school construction project? To what extent may school boards legally enforce or even consider such policies? The issue rose for that board following the death of a student at a district elementary school. A member of the construction team at the school, who is a sex offender, has been charged.

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Dallas: Paddling out, uniforms in

School trustees voted 7-0 last week to end corporal punishment and to mandate uniforms for students through eighth grade. Interestingly, a teacher spoke at the trustees' meeting, and advocated strongly for uniforms for high school students, citing a recent local teachers' union survey.

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Want privacy about your salary? Don't get a job in public K-12

We were perusing a quality blog written by Patti Ghezzi, an education reporter at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution called Get Schooled, and we found an interesting tidbit: Salaries for employees in every public school district in Georgia are listed here, by name. Easy to access and peruse. We wonder if your state's website provides such a painlessly searchable feature for public education employees. Let us know.

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