Schools
An End to No Child Left Behind Could Spell an End to Outside Tutoring in NJ
An NCLB waiver would free up federal funds for other educational reforms in the Garden State.
With all the talk of New Jersey and other states seeking waivers from the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, one result could be an end to the growing reliance on outside tutoring firms for students in the lowest-performing schools.
In the last available count, more than 23,000 New Jersey students in 2009-2010 availed themselves of the free after-school tutoring that NCLB requires schools to offer if they fall short of achievement requirements.
Free tutoring is not the only option, although it is by far the most popular. Students are also allowed to transfer to higher-performing schools in their districts.
Find out what's happening in Little Silver-Oceanportwith free, real-time updates from Patch.
Those receiving tutoring accounted for about 14 percent of all eligible students, but they were spread across more than 120 districts, according to the state's data. These ranged from Franklin Township, where one student was provided "supplemental education services" (SES), to some 3,000 students in Newark schools.
The actual tutoring is done by nearly 130 firms approved by the state -- large and small, non- and for-profit -- all of which jockey for an average of $2,000 per student in public funds through advertising, word of mouth and "SES provider fairs." In 2009-10, the market segment amounted to $33 million.
Find out what's happening in Little Silver-Oceanportwith free, real-time updates from Patch.
Ten Years of Tutoring
But after a decade, the SES program may end soon in New Jersey. The Christie administration plans to apply for a waiver from the NCLB and all its strictures, including SES.
If the waiver is granted, New Jersey would be able to put the federal funds earmarked for SES toward other reforms, a move that acting education commissioner Chris Cerf said he'd be inclined to do.
He said a longer school day could be included, but differently structured than SES, which he said suffered from a "Oklahoma land-rush mentality" of unproven providers entering the market that in some districts can draw as much as $4,000 per student.
"The best you can say is the SES has been a very mixed bag," he said yesterday. "There are very few outcome studies that say it has made a difference, with some of them very good but some clearly fly by night."
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