31st January 2011 9:00
By Blue Tutors
The mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, has recently announced that the city is to get $10 million of investment to tutor schoolchildren who are falling behind grade level. Reported on the Wall Street Journal’s website, the news comes following months of criticism over the city’s lack of action to address what many parents and teachers see as an important issue: the low number of students achieving proficiency in Maths and English.
Bloomberg said that the money could help tutor up to 50,000 students at 500 schools, but many critics have said that the number of students requiring tuition is in the hundreds of thousands, and the overall education budget of $20 billion, makes the £10 million investment in private tuition appear relatively small. However, neither the parent or the teacher flanking Bloomberg during the announcement were prepared to criticise him. The parent, Zakiyah Ansani, said “Our voices were heard”.
The worry surrounding English and Maths proficiencies in New York follows a change in the minimum standards required for students in the third to the eighth grade. The standards are now much higher, and that has led to the number of students achieving proficiency in Maths falling from 82% to 54%, and in English the figure has fallen from 69% to 42%.
The money will be sent to schools next month, so that they can begin to arrange the tuition. Bloomberg defended the time it has taken him to implement the policy, pointing to a change in the New York chancellor as a catalyst to get the tutoring underway.