20th June 2013 9:00
By Blue Tutors
According to a report on the Roll Call website, the United States’ ‘No Child Left Behind’ scheme is failing in a number of states where a waiver from the scheme has been granted. The scheme was designed to provide private tuition to students who aren’t meeting the minimum required levels in English and maths. It was made unlawful for a school not to arrange tuition for a student who needed it, and ensure that the student reached the required level. However, many states were granted waivers from the scheme when the results were not immediately forthcoming.
The report suggests that, having been granted a waiver from NCLB, states are operating exactly how they had before, and ignoring students who desperately need the tuition. The waivers were intended to be temporary, to allow states to organise their auxiliary tutoring properly, and eventually begin to meet the government’s requirements, but studies suggest that this isn’t happening, and that, once the waiver is granted, school districts are ignoring the need to arrange individual tuition.
The Elementary and Secondary Education Act should be reauthorized by the government, according to the article, but in the absence of that reauthorisation, it would be left up to the Department for Education to oversee each individual school district which would be a mammoth task.
A study by the department for education, Tutoring Works, recently showed that students involved in extra tuition schemes made statistically significant gains in both reading and maths. Maybe more importantly, however, the study showed that students in the program had significantly higher results than those eligible for such a tuition scheme but who did not participate.