23rd November 2011 9:00
By Blue Tutors
Another reporter in Houston has called the ‘No Child Left Behind’ scheme into question. Patricia Kilday Hart, writing in the Houston Chronicle said that she was recently approached by the owner of a tuition agency who wanted to emphasise that some tuition agencies aren’t unethical, despite the large number who are fraudulently benefitting from the government funding involved.
We have reported before on the issues with the US funding for NCLB. Essentially there is little verification of the claims made by tuition agencies, so local governments are invoiced for a number of hours that were never actually taught. If the students aren’t tracked down and asked to verify the lessons given then the agency receives their fee. There are other loopholes in the scheme. For example, tutors are only allowed to bill $1,400 a year per student, but there are reports of tutors charging up to $250 an hour and teaching very few hours of lessons.
One the ways some companies appear to dodge the authorities is by offering gifts to students. The ploy is to ask students to claim that they were tutored in return for a free laptop or a free mobile phone. One company under scrutiny for this is ‘Tutors with Computers’. They claim that students need the laptops that are distributed because they are ‘essential for the lessons given’. Tutors with Computers leads the competition in Houston, accounting for $6million of the $20million funding the last year. Kilday Hart is suspicious of the situation though, because the chairman of TWC is Rod Paige, who was George Bush’s education secretary when the NCLB was introduced. If nothing else, this does appear to be a serious conflict of interests.