19th December 2011 9:00
By Blue Tutors
Officials in South Dakota are looking to end the requirement to spend significant amounts of public money on private tuition for students from low-income families. The ‘No Child Left Behind’ programme stipulates that school districts must spend 20% of their funding on extra tutoring for the poorest students in the area. However, a recent survey has shown that many of the students tutored haven’t improved in reading tests, and some have actually got worse results in maths tests.
The Sioux Falls district’s federal programmes coordinator, Ann Smith, said that there was no evidence that the private tuition was making a significant difference, or even any difference at all. She felt that one-to-one tuition should be making a clear difference to a student’s test results.
Stephanie Spaan is the owner of Excel Achievement Center, one of the providers of extra tuition in the district, and she says that each of her students is tested before and after the lessons, and the results reported to the state. However, Excel is just one of eighteen providers of private tuition in the district, and overall the results don’t show that the lessons are working.
One of the reasons given for the failure is that low-income families don’t necessarily have under-performing children, so many strong students are receiving extra help that they don’t need. Also, the tuition providers don’t liaise with schools, so often they teaching content that students aren’t currently studying, which creates less impact on test scores (of course, it might mean improvements in future test scores). Another worry is the fraud that has plagued the No Child Left Behind scheme, and it’s possible that many of the lessons charged for haven’t actually taken place, which would explain the test scores.
Despite the discouraging statistics, many of the parents questioned praised the scheme, and said that they think it has made a big difference. One parent said that the tuition her dyslexic son receives would cost $200 a month, which she could not afford, and she has seen dramatic improvements in his son’s reading ability.