Follow EIA In an editorial, the Washington Post sounds the alarm, “…we worry that the administration is rashly scrapping the requirement that parents in failing schools be offered school choice and free tutoring.”
Let’s be clear, low-income students in the worst schools will be cut off from free tutoring by many districts if the President’s “optional” tutoring policy is not corrected. The Post is right to call the Administration on this mistake. For many low income students, the tutoring is essential — and without it, they will fall farther and farther behind. The unintended consequence of the Administration’s policy on after school tutoring (known as SES) will be to widen the achievement gap, not to close it. No doubt the President and his Secretary of Education are committed to eliminating the raciland ethnic achievment gap that plagues our urban schools. So it should be obvious that making tutoring “optional” will only encourage the gap to get wider.
Why are they proposing a policy to end free tutoring for low-income students? Their argument is that the Federal role should not be prescriptive, and schools should choose the ways in which they attain the ultimate goal of college and career ready. It is overly simplistic to believe that historically poor performing schools — or their districts or states — will choose in the best interest of the students they are already underserving.
Free tutoring for low income students should be required if a school is historically underperforming. It is the lifeline that many students are holding onto.
In a commentary published in Ed Week, a sociologist at the RAND Corporation, Megan Beckett, asks if after school tutoring is really effective for students in under performing schools. She suggests that we don’t really know if the tutoring is effective for these children, and then uses this argument to offer a well-intentioned proposal to measuring student achievement by randomly assigning students to tutors.
Let’s be clear – if year over year increases in supplemental educational services (SES) enrollments and student/parent satisfaction surveys don’t tell the story, then consider the many rigorous studies that have already been completed already and to show unequivocally that after school tutoring is effective in raising the achievement of low-income kids in underperforming schools.
In fact, the RAND CORPORATION did the one such study. The executive summary of the 2007 report written by RAND and published by the Department of Education plainly states:
- Impact of Title I supplemental educational services on student achievement. On average, across seven districts, 2 participation in supplemental educational services had a statistically significant, positive effect on students’ achievement in reading and math. Students participating for multiple years experienced larger gains.
This is not the study’s only finding. And this is not the only study that affirms the benefits of after school tutoring for underachieving students. Experimental designs are, indeed, the gold standard but other rigorous methodologies used across education programs including SES reveal significant and positive effects. After eight years of SES, we know that after-school tutoring works, and works well, for students who enroll and regularly attend their tutoring sessions
The achievement gap is real, and historically failing schools continue to offer students instruction but serve only to widen gap between low-income students and their peers. After school tutoring is one method that we must use to help students to achieve when they find themselves in the downward spiral of the achievement gap. Questioning whether or not tutoring is effective in order to offer a series of proposals, however well-intentioned, is only serving to feed the interests who see after school tutoring as a pot of federal funding that they want to get their hands on instead of the proven success that it is.
I am reminded of a story about the late Senator Ted Kennedy who helped to craft the SES program into law. I was present when a researcher from Harvard before his committee was laying out his own case against SES by saying tutoring doesn’t work, when Senator Kennedy interrupted him with, “Sir, I was tutored, and my children were tutored, and theirs will be too. Don’t tell me that I have been wasting my time and money. We do it because it works.”
Today is the day that states turn in their homework (applications to be exact) for the Race to the Top federal grant competition. Already, this competition has been a tremendous success — moving education policy strongly in the direction of reform. Good luck to all the states.
At the Education Industry Association, we are particularly focused on reforms that will help low income students in underperforming schools. Our members include the nation’s top SES providers who are actively engaged with low income children every day through after school tutoring — and that helps to close the education achievement gap. And so, we admire the Education Equality Project (EEP) and their commitment to eliminating the achievement gap in our nation’s public schools. EEP launched a new “Get the Facts” section of their website yesterday, and we highly recommend it for everybody who cares about students and the schools they attend. Here’s the intro to some of the most compelling facts in education today:
- The Education Equality Project strongly believes that “what gets measured gets done.” For far too long we have lacked the necessary data to track and understand the breadth, depth, and complexity of the education achievement gap. Luckily, that is changing. Today we have more information about success and failure in public education than ever before, helping us to better understand and solve the achievement gap. In this section, we highlight some of the most telling facts about the achievement gap –- showcasing what we know about both the problem and its solutions.
Check out the “Get the Facts” section, and see for yourself.
A report released from the Southern Education Foundation was making the headlines late last week. The report chronicles the demographic shifts in the South that have produced the first region in the country where more than half of public school students are poor and more than half are members of minorities.
In its coverage of the SEF study, The New York Times reports:
School districts in the South are already struggling to adapt, but it is not clear which methods are most effective.
“That’s the question that Congress, the legislature, the Gates Foundation — everybody’s trying to solve that,” said Arthur C. Johnson, the superintendent of the Palm Beach School District in Florida, which has gone from 40 percent minority students to 63 percent in 15 years. Remedial programs, career-centered academies, and intensive teacher training have helped, Mr. Johnson said, but have not closed the gap in achievement and graduation rates.
It should not be overlooked that many of the nation’s (not just the South’s) school districts having waiting lists for free after school tutoring for low-income children. Academic help is available to students at no cost, but some districts choose to wait-list these students rather than use Federal funds to pay for tutoring. Edreformer.com, Tom Vander Ark’s education reform blog, examined the difficulty that many students have in obtaining after school tutoring funding. Of course, better access to after school tutoring is not going to solve the challenges that low-income students in the South face, but it is an under-used tool that school districts should take advantage of.
As Congress and the Administration begin to formulate the ESEA reauthorization, they should confront the issue of access to after school tutoring. Many policymakers are suggesting that longer day/longer year policies are essential, and so they should look to the current providers of after school academic services first to discover what is working and what is not.
Findings like those in the SEF report will become more common unless we put all of our resources to work educating our children.
The LA Times has great coverage of the California Assembly’s vote to “give” parents more power over their chilren’s education options.
One provision of the measures allows parents at poor-performing schools to force changes in school operations. If at least 50% of the parents at a school sign a petition, the school board must choose one of a handful of options, including closing the campus, converting it to a charter or replacing the principal and other administrators.
As a compromise, supporters of the measure agreed to limit the number of schools at which parent petitions would force action to 75.
That petition proposal was born of battles within the Los Angeles Unified School District, which has adopted a similar but more limited concept.
Ben Austin, executive director of the foundation-funded parent organizing effort Parent Revolution, hailed the Assembly action.
“It’s an entirely new way of thinking about public education. It’s about giving parents real power to advocate for their children,” said Austin, whose group has close ties to Green Dot Public Schools, a charter school management organization based in Southern California. Charters are public schools that operate independently of many district rules and are mostly nonunion.
Parents are now essential leaders in the school reform movement — making decisions about after school tutoring for their children, charter school and online options and now transforming their local school.
A report supplementing the CREDO National Charter School Study “Multiple Choice: Charter School Performance in 16 States,” released in June 2009, has an in-depth examination of the results for charter schools in New York City.
Overall the results found that the typical student in a New York City charter school learns more than their
virtual counterparts in their feeder pool in reading and mathematics. In school-by-school comparisons New
York City charters perform relatively better in math than in reading. In math, more than half the charter
schools are showing academic growth that is statistically larger than their students would have achieved in
their regular public schools. A third of charter schools show no difference, and 16 percent were found to
have significantly lower learning. In reading, the numbers are not as strong, but show that nearly 30
percent outperform their local alternatives, 12 percent deliver worse results and about 60 percent are
producing learning that is equivalent to their regular public school counterparts.
For the interested reader, the full report is available at credo.stanford.edu.
If you want to listen to real talent, have a quick listen to the Detroit School of Arts radio production of Broadway hit “The Wiz.” It’s an abbreviated version, and it is sure to make your toes tap. Enjoy!
Waiting lists for after school tutoring are frustrating. They say different things to different people.
- Too many low-income kids are not getting the help they need in schools, but kids who can afford private tutoring are.
- Not enough resources are being dedicated to ensuring that low-income students who are dedicated to working hard and putting in extra hours.
- We will not close the achievement gap if we don’t focus energy and attention of all children.
- Many schools are not committed the tutoring model.
Right now, scores of districts have waiting lists tens of thousands of students long, even as they spend their stimulus dollars on other priorities. Look at the numbers of children waiting to receive tutoring, but who are simply waitlisted because the funding is going elesewhere:
- Chicago: 20,000
- Miami: 16,000
- Boston: 6,000
- Hartford: 3,000
- Denver: 2,000
- Indianapolis: 1,000
- Broward County: 1,000
- West Palm Beach: 1,000
- Paterson: 1,000
- Jersey City: 1,000
The solution is clearly a combination of better performance in the classroom by students and teachers, a more streamlined way to get low-income kids the tutoring they need, and a system that doesn’t throw its hands in the air and its kids on waiting lists.
Secretary Duncan Discusses STEM edcuation
Check out Secretary Duncan’s interview discussing the White House vision for renewed focus on science, technology engineering and math education.
Along with the White House Science Advisor Dr. John Holdren, Secretary Duncan oultines the Obama Administration’s priority after the President’s announcement of a private industry partnership with government to make STEM exciting to students — both out of school and in school.
US News & World Report opined on how feelings about NCLB are conflicted. Zach Miners writes:
Education Department officials have started holding meetings nationwide with teachers, parents, and others to get their input on changes to the NCLB legislation. While department officials might not entirely agree with NCLB’s practices, they can’t walk away from the law yet, either.
NCLB made changes with a vision — accountability, choice, private sector involvement — all focused on improving the performance of students in the classroom. It’s almost ten years later. What is the vision for education for the next ten or twenty year? Or do we just want to “make changes” to NCLB?
Right now, public education is not serving all students equitably. We should fast-forward to a vision of schools in 2020, and ask ourselves – “What are we doing today to instill equality in education today that will serve children well for the next decade?”