There’s no doubt there are leaders and laggards when it comes to our public schools.  But how do we help those kids in struggling schools without condemning the teacher, the building, or even the school district?  For the folks responsible for No Child Left Behind, the answer was SES, or supplemental educational services.  The idea was brilliant in its simplicity — for students in struggling schools, make extra help and tutoring available to get them up to par.  SES was intended to provide all students with a common base of instruction and support.

Of course, those of us in education reform know that the promise and the reality are often far, far away from each other.  Exhibit 1, today’s Washington Post piece on how SES programs in Virginia and Maryland have done little to improve student achievement.  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/12/AR2008061203681.html

For years, Eduflack has heard about the problems with SES tutoring.  For much of the NCLB era, SES funding sat dormant, with many schools not sure how to spend the money.  Originally, people said the tutoring funds would be spent to send poor kids to for-profit providers like Sylvan or Huntington or Kumon.  Makes sense, right?  If a family with means has a kid struggling to make the grade, they pick up the phone and book their kid in a tutoring program.  Why shouldn’t a family without the financial ability be able to take the same advantages with SES?

The hitch, of course, is that many of the for-profit tutors have business models that set them up near those families of means.  We see tutoring centers in the suburbs.  We certainly don’t see them in our urban centers, where many of the struggling schools are located.  So who provides the tutoring?

Unfortunately, in far too many of these struggling neighborhoods, the schools turned to classroom teachers to provide after-school tutoring (with extra pay funded through SES, of course.)  Imagine the logic.  Students are not getting the skills they need during school hours from their teachers, so we pay the SAME teachers extra money to teach the SAME kids after school?  And then we wonder why SES funding isn’t demonstrating measurable improvements on student assessments?  Only in America.

And the circle of life continues.  We look to education reforms to change practice and fix that which is broken.  SES is a well-intentioned reform with strong potential.  But like so many other NCLB-era policies, it fails in the execution.  With so much supplemental money available to boost struggling students, it’s a shame so many don’t get much more than a retread of the instruction that just doesn’t work in the first place.

Where does all of this take us?  Under NCLB, we also give those struggling students the option of transferring to better schools that provide the academic means get students on track.  We’ve all seen the numbers, and few families ever take advantage of the school choice provisions, fearing transportation costs and believing their neighborhood schools are doing the best they can. 

Maybe this latest data will have more families take a second look at the options available to give their kids the educational helping hand they deserve.