NCLB's Supplemental Educational Services: Is This What Our Students Need?

Abstract

SUPPLEMENTAL educational services, as legislated in the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001, must be made available to students in low-performing Title I schools. Although we have just completed the fourth year since implementation began, a handful of evaluations are beginning to present a few common themes. The federal out-of-school tutoring program features free-market strategies promoted by the Bush Administration: parental choice, money following individual students, and the privatization of educational delivery. Created in response to low standardized-test scores, the requirement for supplemental educational services also reflects NCLB's lack of interest in the wider goals of public schools or students' school experiences. Just as NCLB has forced high-poverty schools to narrow their academic offerings to ensure that students make adequate yearly progress in English and math, (1) the two subjects currently tested, the supplemental services provision extends this narrowed educational agenda into students' out-of-school hours. After-school programs had already begun a rapid expansion before NCLB, partly as a result of President Clinton's 21st Century Community Learning Centers and partly because of concerns about rising numbers of latchkey children and increasing crime rates in the hours between 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. There was also growing awareness that the poor were concentrated in inner cities and that regular classroom hours were too few to impart the academic, developmental, and social skills necessary to help many low-income children move out of poverty. At the upper ends of the range of income and wealth, competition for college entrance was fueling a thriving tutoring industry on the lookout for new markets. With about $2.6 billion of the $13 billion in Title I funds potentially usable for supplemental services, the new federal program was a boon to the private tutoring industry and to nonprofits already providing tutoring. As with vouchers, which were on the conservative agenda when supplemental services emerged as a compromise initiative, money for supplemental services follows the student. That is, a Title I school designated in need of improvement must inform its students of available tutoring and reimburse the supplemental services provider that each student chooses. (2) School spending for tutoring varies widely, depending on a school's Title I allotment, the number of students using supplemental services, and providers' hourly rates. However, costs for supplemental services have risen steadily over the past four years, reaching an average of more than $1,400 per student in 2004, which is two to three times the cost of Title I comprehensive schoolwide programs. (3) Given the current 20% cap on the use of Title I funds for supplemental services and choice-related transportation, districts estimate that they can serve about a fifth of all eligible children with available Title I funds, though urban districts estimate that they can pay for only 18%. (4) The percentage is still lower in large, high-poverty districts: Los Angeles, for instance, can serve 16% of those eligible with existing Title I funds. (5) So far, however, enrollment in supplemental services nationwide remains low. According to the most recent estimate by the U.S. Department of Education (ED), only 233,000 or 11% of the two million eligible students are enrolled nationwide. (6) Moreover, a new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) finds that 20% of districts required to offer supplemental services had no students enrolled. The majority of these were rural or had fewer than 2,500 students. (7) In the 299 districts surveyed by the Center on Education Policy (CEP) in 2005-06, 20% of eligible students took advantage of supplemental services. However, extremely low percentages of eligible students enrolling in supplemental services have been reported in Houston (3%) and Philadelphia (5%). (8) In Los Angeles, 32,500 or 11% of all eligible students are enrolled in supplemental services, but 318,000 students participate in various academic intervention programs before or after school or on Saturdays. …