public policy so illogical as to border on mass psychosis
News from Canton, OH. No doubt students across the country are in similar straits.
Tutoring funding cut
Sunday, June 25, 2006
By Melissa Griffy Seeton, Repository Education Writer
Britney Gooden, 17, attributes her passing grade to a tutoring program funded by GEAR UP — Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs. The program at Canton City Schools began six years ago as a way to help low-income and minority students.
Failing schools must — by the federal No Child Left Behind Act — provide tutoring programs for their students.
But what happens when one of the only in-school tutoring programs loses funding and other programs OK’d by the Ohio Department of Education are in places such as St. Paul, Baltimore and Nashville?
Few students attend.
Of the 282 Canton City Schools students who qualified for private tutoring services under the federal act, just 10 signed up for the private services for the entire last school year. And some argue that Canton’s federal allocation of more than $1 million for the private tutors comes at the expense of other in-school Title 1 special-education programs.
Meanwhile, budget cuts pushed by the Bush administration threaten to eliminate a program that helped more than 30 students at Timken High School graduate this year.
PROGRAM AT RISK
It came down to the wire for Britney Gooden.
The Timken senior had to pass an Algebra II-trigonometry exam to participate in graduation less than a week away.
Gooden pressed her hand against her forehead as she practiced her math problems over and over again. Her exam was less than an hour away.
“My goal is to get a 90 percent,” Gooden said with a hopeful smile. She skimmed by with a 69.
A week later Gooden sat at her Belden Avenue SE home clutching her diploma. “I didn’t know I could do it,” she said at the graduation party that was once just a dream. “I wanted to cry at graduation, but I held back. The whole thing, it didn’t feel for real.”
The 17-year-old attributes her passing grade to a tutoring program funded by GEAR UP — Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs. The program at Canton City Schools began six years ago as a way to help low-income and minority students, and it follows students from the junior high level to senior year.
The program applied for but didn’t get the federal money last year, and no one knows if it will get it this year. If it is rejected again, the program will fold.
Some 1,400 college access programs similar to GEAR UP have helped about a half-million high school and middle school students, even veterans, according to the Council for Opportunity in Education in Washington, D.C. The programs help students graduate and go on to college through tutoring, online coursework, summer school, and even helping them complete college applications and financial-aid forms.
But funding for such programs is eliminated under the proposed 2007-08 federal budget.
“It is senseless to cut programs like TRIO and GEAR UP that help working class students go to college,” maintained Arnold Mitchem, president of the council.
This year, at least 100 students came through the Canton program’s doors daily. Because it was in Timken and McKinley high schools, students could stop by anytime they needed help — during study halls, even during classes, such as math, when some were particularly struggling.
“Some of our students didn’t learn the fundamentals, like fractions, and that is getting in the way of them learning logarithms,” said William Moore II, who has been a GEAR UP tutor for the past two years.
This year, the program focused on students with a GPA below 2.0 and those who had yet to pass the standardized tests they must pass to graduate.
Paralee Compton, the program’s coordinator, said GEAR UP served more than 1,200 students in the past five years with the $5.5 million it got in federal grants and from community partners such as Kent State University.
“The loss of the program will really leave a void for the children in the category of minority and low income,” said Compton, who plans to testify before Congress next month in hopes funding will be restored. “Those are the ones that need the help.”
BIG MONEY, LOOSE GUIDELINES
While not-for-profit programs are being cut, some for-profit private tutoring services — known as Supplemental Educational Services — are getting part of the federal money school districts receive from the U.S. Department of Education to help poor children.
If every student eligible to participate in the private tutoring did, $2 billion in federal education dollars would be filtered through school districts to private companies, according to Educate Inc., formerly known as Sylvan Learning Services.
But the federal Department of Education estimates just 10 percent to 20 percent of eligible students are participating in the private tutoring.
“We can’t gauge how much money goes to private companies,” said Chad Colby, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Education.
Why?
The federal government sets no limit on fees a tutoring company can charge. Ohio’s approved tutoring providers charge anywhere from $20 to $45 an hour, or a flat rate ranging from $1,200 to more than $2,200 for one child.
There are no concrete federal guidelines for the private services; states also approve tutoring providers based on loosely defined criteria.
“The approval process and evaluation process can be different from state to state,” Colby said.
According to the most recent statistics from the Ohio Department of Education, just 5,012 students were reported to have participated in the private services out of an estimated 53,139 who were eligible during the 2004-05 school year.
Some simply opt out, said said Karla Carruthers, a spokesman for the state department. “Not all parents should be expected to choose for their students to participate and not all eligible students really need the services. Time, location, provider competence, need, etc., are all considerations for parents.”
While the law requires that economically disadvantaged students be served under supplemental tutoring services, priority is given to academically disadvantaged students, she added.
Private tutoring “is not the magic bullet here in improving academic performance,” Carruthers said. “But we are working with districts to make sure they inform parents of providers and programs.”
NO FORWARDING ADDRESS
In Ohio, private tutoring services are approved whether or not they accept the Education Industry Association’s Code of Professional Conduct and Business Ethics for such providers.
The private tutors are supposed to have at least two years of college.
Yet the way the law is written, teachers in failing districts — who have higher degrees and training — are barred from tutoring their district’s students.
“It doesn’t make sense,” said Patricia Rohrer, who is in charge of federal programs at Canton City Schools. “There are high-quality teachers who have to adhere to certain standards — why should (tutoring) providers be exempt?”
The law requires local school districts to contact all state-approved providers and draw up contracts with them. The local districts also must notify parents of children who are eligible for the private tutoring.
But of the nearly 140 on the state’s approved list, fewer than 20 said they would consider tutoring Canton City Schools students next year, said Rohrer. She held up a stack of letters she received back from the services, unopened. They were nondeliverable. The state, she said, doesn’t always keep its providers list updated.
And a review of provider applications reveals that some out-of-state tutoring providers approved by the state have no online or Web-based instruction. That includes A to Z In-Home Tutoring LLC in Nashville, Failure Free Reading Instant Achievement Center in Concord, N.C., and Edceleration Educational Services in Detroit.
Canton informed parents whose children were eligible for the services in October and November. It held follow-up meetings and sent letters from December into February.
But the scant response may be understandable, said Rohrer: “As a parent, are you going to send your child to a tutoring provider in, say, Dayton?”
GET WHAT YOU GIVE
Chris Clevenger shouts with joy when she sees Craig Priester.
She’d been calling the Timken senior all day. He hadn’t shown up for school and he still needed to finish some course work in order to graduate.
Priester was one of 44 seniors in Canton’s GEAR UP program who hadn’t passed the state proficiency test when the school year began. By year’s end, three-quarters passed.
“We are going to keep on them because that’s what we do,” said Clevenger, the tutor coordinator whom students refer to as “Clev.”
The GEAR UP program started with a small group of adults who became an ensemble charged with making sure students get a certain grade, show up for class, even go to their senior prom.
“We’ve become surrogate parents in a way,” Clevenger said. “We are really exhausted by the end of the day — but you get back every bit you give.”
Ricardo Parker used the equipment in Timken’s tutoring room to research, type and print a Spanish II report on Argentina. “They made it mandatory I had to come to GEAR UP for the first time this year,” said 17-year-old Parker. “I was able to get a tutor.”
Parker graduated earlier this month and wants to become a graphic designer. He plans to go to the University of Akron.
Timken junior Lynette Doyle spent time in the GEAR UP room doing advance schoolwork before going on pregnancy leave. That was in March. By May, she caught up on all her missed work; she’ll move on with the rest of her class as a senior in the fall.
The in-school tutors “help motivate you to do better in school,” Doyle said. “If you have personal problems, they help you with that, too.”
NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND?
The federal tutoring funding was designed to put millions toward helping poor students achieve. Yet it has become another obstacle for them, their parents, school districts, even providers, said Joe French, executive director of Canton Calvary Mission.
French’s Gibbs Avenue NE church was one of the few approved private tutoring providers in Canton; it dropped out of the program this year.
The church tutored just two children under the program, French said, and found “the requirements too strenuous.”
According to its state application, the church was charging $80 a week per student.
The church, unusual in that its volunteer coordinator has an education degree, found it tough to come up with individualized learning programs to meet some of the tutoring program’s requirements.
Instead of continuing with the program, the church is focusing on its more popular afterschool program; it tutors about 20 children and another 30 are involved in its afterschool homework club.
“Our low-income families are so inundated with people being involved in their lives. This (federal tutoring program) was just another piece of that,” French said. “The more people are involved, the more cynical and disconnected families feel. For some of them, the one thing they truly have ownership of is their child, and SES is another hoop to jump through. And the parents we serve don’t jump through hoops well.”
The irony, he added, is that the poorest students — who should be getting the biggest benefit from the federal subsidy — end up losing the most.
Reach Repository writer Melissa Griffy Seeton at (330) 580-8318 or e-mail: melissa.griffy@cantonrep.com
THE REQUIREMENT
Under the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, school districts are required, under some circumstances, to provide parents and their children with the option of using supplemental educational services. This option can be used when a student’s school is a Title I-served building that has not demonstrated Adequate Yearly Progress for three years on the state’s annual report cards. When this occurs, the school is considered to be in School Improvement Year 2 status.
Students eligible for SES are from low-income families who attend a federal aid Title I-served school in School Improvement Year 2 or higher. Priority is given to the lowest-achieving eligible students.
Tutoring funding cut
Sunday, June 25, 2006
By Melissa Griffy Seeton, Repository Education Writer
Britney Gooden, 17, attributes her passing grade to a tutoring program funded by GEAR UP — Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs. The program at Canton City Schools began six years ago as a way to help low-income and minority students.
Failing schools must — by the federal No Child Left Behind Act — provide tutoring programs for their students.
But what happens when one of the only in-school tutoring programs loses funding and other programs OK’d by the Ohio Department of Education are in places such as St. Paul, Baltimore and Nashville?
Few students attend.
Of the 282 Canton City Schools students who qualified for private tutoring services under the federal act, just 10 signed up for the private services for the entire last school year. And some argue that Canton’s federal allocation of more than $1 million for the private tutors comes at the expense of other in-school Title 1 special-education programs.
Meanwhile, budget cuts pushed by the Bush administration threaten to eliminate a program that helped more than 30 students at Timken High School graduate this year.
PROGRAM AT RISK
It came down to the wire for Britney Gooden.
The Timken senior had to pass an Algebra II-trigonometry exam to participate in graduation less than a week away.
Gooden pressed her hand against her forehead as she practiced her math problems over and over again. Her exam was less than an hour away.
“My goal is to get a 90 percent,” Gooden said with a hopeful smile. She skimmed by with a 69.
A week later Gooden sat at her Belden Avenue SE home clutching her diploma. “I didn’t know I could do it,” she said at the graduation party that was once just a dream. “I wanted to cry at graduation, but I held back. The whole thing, it didn’t feel for real.”
The 17-year-old attributes her passing grade to a tutoring program funded by GEAR UP — Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs. The program at Canton City Schools began six years ago as a way to help low-income and minority students, and it follows students from the junior high level to senior year.
The program applied for but didn’t get the federal money last year, and no one knows if it will get it this year. If it is rejected again, the program will fold.
Some 1,400 college access programs similar to GEAR UP have helped about a half-million high school and middle school students, even veterans, according to the Council for Opportunity in Education in Washington, D.C. The programs help students graduate and go on to college through tutoring, online coursework, summer school, and even helping them complete college applications and financial-aid forms.
But funding for such programs is eliminated under the proposed 2007-08 federal budget.
“It is senseless to cut programs like TRIO and GEAR UP that help working class students go to college,” maintained Arnold Mitchem, president of the council.
This year, at least 100 students came through the Canton program’s doors daily. Because it was in Timken and McKinley high schools, students could stop by anytime they needed help — during study halls, even during classes, such as math, when some were particularly struggling.
“Some of our students didn’t learn the fundamentals, like fractions, and that is getting in the way of them learning logarithms,” said William Moore II, who has been a GEAR UP tutor for the past two years.
This year, the program focused on students with a GPA below 2.0 and those who had yet to pass the standardized tests they must pass to graduate.
Paralee Compton, the program’s coordinator, said GEAR UP served more than 1,200 students in the past five years with the $5.5 million it got in federal grants and from community partners such as Kent State University.
“The loss of the program will really leave a void for the children in the category of minority and low income,” said Compton, who plans to testify before Congress next month in hopes funding will be restored. “Those are the ones that need the help.”
BIG MONEY, LOOSE GUIDELINES
While not-for-profit programs are being cut, some for-profit private tutoring services — known as Supplemental Educational Services — are getting part of the federal money school districts receive from the U.S. Department of Education to help poor children.
If every student eligible to participate in the private tutoring did, $2 billion in federal education dollars would be filtered through school districts to private companies, according to Educate Inc., formerly known as Sylvan Learning Services.
But the federal Department of Education estimates just 10 percent to 20 percent of eligible students are participating in the private tutoring.
“We can’t gauge how much money goes to private companies,” said Chad Colby, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Education.
Why?
The federal government sets no limit on fees a tutoring company can charge. Ohio’s approved tutoring providers charge anywhere from $20 to $45 an hour, or a flat rate ranging from $1,200 to more than $2,200 for one child.
There are no concrete federal guidelines for the private services; states also approve tutoring providers based on loosely defined criteria.
“The approval process and evaluation process can be different from state to state,” Colby said.
According to the most recent statistics from the Ohio Department of Education, just 5,012 students were reported to have participated in the private services out of an estimated 53,139 who were eligible during the 2004-05 school year.
Some simply opt out, said said Karla Carruthers, a spokesman for the state department. “Not all parents should be expected to choose for their students to participate and not all eligible students really need the services. Time, location, provider competence, need, etc., are all considerations for parents.”
While the law requires that economically disadvantaged students be served under supplemental tutoring services, priority is given to academically disadvantaged students, she added.
Private tutoring “is not the magic bullet here in improving academic performance,” Carruthers said. “But we are working with districts to make sure they inform parents of providers and programs.”
NO FORWARDING ADDRESS
In Ohio, private tutoring services are approved whether or not they accept the Education Industry Association’s Code of Professional Conduct and Business Ethics for such providers.
The private tutors are supposed to have at least two years of college.
Yet the way the law is written, teachers in failing districts — who have higher degrees and training — are barred from tutoring their district’s students.
“It doesn’t make sense,” said Patricia Rohrer, who is in charge of federal programs at Canton City Schools. “There are high-quality teachers who have to adhere to certain standards — why should (tutoring) providers be exempt?”
The law requires local school districts to contact all state-approved providers and draw up contracts with them. The local districts also must notify parents of children who are eligible for the private tutoring.
But of the nearly 140 on the state’s approved list, fewer than 20 said they would consider tutoring Canton City Schools students next year, said Rohrer. She held up a stack of letters she received back from the services, unopened. They were nondeliverable. The state, she said, doesn’t always keep its providers list updated.
And a review of provider applications reveals that some out-of-state tutoring providers approved by the state have no online or Web-based instruction. That includes A to Z In-Home Tutoring LLC in Nashville, Failure Free Reading Instant Achievement Center in Concord, N.C., and Edceleration Educational Services in Detroit.
Canton informed parents whose children were eligible for the services in October and November. It held follow-up meetings and sent letters from December into February.
But the scant response may be understandable, said Rohrer: “As a parent, are you going to send your child to a tutoring provider in, say, Dayton?”
GET WHAT YOU GIVE
Chris Clevenger shouts with joy when she sees Craig Priester.
She’d been calling the Timken senior all day. He hadn’t shown up for school and he still needed to finish some course work in order to graduate.
Priester was one of 44 seniors in Canton’s GEAR UP program who hadn’t passed the state proficiency test when the school year began. By year’s end, three-quarters passed.
“We are going to keep on them because that’s what we do,” said Clevenger, the tutor coordinator whom students refer to as “Clev.”
The GEAR UP program started with a small group of adults who became an ensemble charged with making sure students get a certain grade, show up for class, even go to their senior prom.
“We’ve become surrogate parents in a way,” Clevenger said. “We are really exhausted by the end of the day — but you get back every bit you give.”
Ricardo Parker used the equipment in Timken’s tutoring room to research, type and print a Spanish II report on Argentina. “They made it mandatory I had to come to GEAR UP for the first time this year,” said 17-year-old Parker. “I was able to get a tutor.”
Parker graduated earlier this month and wants to become a graphic designer. He plans to go to the University of Akron.
Timken junior Lynette Doyle spent time in the GEAR UP room doing advance schoolwork before going on pregnancy leave. That was in March. By May, she caught up on all her missed work; she’ll move on with the rest of her class as a senior in the fall.
The in-school tutors “help motivate you to do better in school,” Doyle said. “If you have personal problems, they help you with that, too.”
NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND?
The federal tutoring funding was designed to put millions toward helping poor students achieve. Yet it has become another obstacle for them, their parents, school districts, even providers, said Joe French, executive director of Canton Calvary Mission.
French’s Gibbs Avenue NE church was one of the few approved private tutoring providers in Canton; it dropped out of the program this year.
The church tutored just two children under the program, French said, and found “the requirements too strenuous.”
According to its state application, the church was charging $80 a week per student.
The church, unusual in that its volunteer coordinator has an education degree, found it tough to come up with individualized learning programs to meet some of the tutoring program’s requirements.
Instead of continuing with the program, the church is focusing on its more popular afterschool program; it tutors about 20 children and another 30 are involved in its afterschool homework club.
“Our low-income families are so inundated with people being involved in their lives. This (federal tutoring program) was just another piece of that,” French said. “The more people are involved, the more cynical and disconnected families feel. For some of them, the one thing they truly have ownership of is their child, and SES is another hoop to jump through. And the parents we serve don’t jump through hoops well.”
The irony, he added, is that the poorest students — who should be getting the biggest benefit from the federal subsidy — end up losing the most.
Reach Repository writer Melissa Griffy Seeton at (330) 580-8318 or e-mail: melissa.griffy@cantonrep.com
THE REQUIREMENT
Under the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, school districts are required, under some circumstances, to provide parents and their children with the option of using supplemental educational services. This option can be used when a student’s school is a Title I-served building that has not demonstrated Adequate Yearly Progress for three years on the state’s annual report cards. When this occurs, the school is considered to be in School Improvement Year 2 status.
Students eligible for SES are from low-income families who attend a federal aid Title I-served school in School Improvement Year 2 or higher. Priority is given to the lowest-achieving eligible students.
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