Education Law

More districts allowed to flip tutoring & choice

The U.S. Department of Education has allowed more school districts in some states to offer supplemental educational services or tutoring in schools entering the first year of improvement under NCLB, see here, a change advocated by NSBA in the reauthorization of the law. The current statute requires districts to provide school choice in the first year of school improvement to allow students to transfer to a school that is not in the improvement status; and add tutoring in the second year of improvement.

Allowing school districts to flip tutoring and choice makes sense because transferring to a different school might not always be feasible for the students and/or the school. The change will enable struggling students to receive extra help immediately rather than wait for another year.

The following states and districts are approved to flip tutoring and choice under ED's SES pilot program:
All school districts in Alabama, Arkansas, North Carolina, Tennessee and Utah; five districts in Alaska; and 14 districts in Virginia. In addition, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, and Indiana were allowed to change the order of tutoring and choice in some schools under ED's differentiated accountability pilot program.

Although this is a positive move, BoardBuzz can't help but wonder why only certain districts and states can have this flexibility. The participation of school choice nationwide is a dismal one percent of all eligible students, which clearly shows the option is not desirable or workable. Besides, such a transfer did not produce observable gains in student achievement, see here. Like many other flaws in the current NCLB, ED alone cannot fix them as they were written into the law. Only Congress has that authority.

Full post as published by BoardBuzz: NSBA's Daily Weblog on August 06, 2008 (boomark / email).