Why SES isn’t as widely used as it should be

There are a few simple and obvious reasons why supplemental educational services (SES) has not “taken hold”, and it’s not for lack of parent or provider interest or effort.  In fact, in the current school year, hundreds of thousands of parents have signed their students up for services only to be denied that right by districts intentionally limiting or capping enrollment in order to divert these funds to other initiatives.

SES was incorporated into NCLB as a service to be offered to students trapped in a failing school.  After the third year of being in need of improvement, a school is required to offer it’s students supplemental tutoring.   Some districts offer tutoring themselves, but most rely on outside organizations but they often cap the number of students that can participate.  Right now, scores of districts have waiting lists tens of thousands of students long, even as they spend their stimulus dollars on other priorities:

• Chicago: 20,000
• Miami: 16,000
• Boston: 6,000
• Hartford: 3,000
• Denver: 2,000
• Indianapolis: 1,000
• Broward County: 1,000
• West Palm Beach: 1,000
• Paterson: 1,000
• Jersey City: 1,000 ……And the list goes on and on.

To be clear, the above numbers represent the number or students who were DENIED access to tutoring because of district capping.  Many more hundreds of thousands of students are actually in SES programs.  The mobilization of more than half a million parents to take the steps (sometimes multiple steps required by districts) to get their child the extra help they need after school represents an unprecedented grassroots effort on behalf of parents and providers to gain access to extra tutoring help for students who are trapped in chronically underperforming schools.   This is about providing 1 on 1 or small group intensive, explicit instruction after the school day for low-income students.

But for school districts that hold the purse strings, it’s not about that at all.  It’s about control and money.  High quality, focused after-school instruction is something districts could have done long before NCLB if it was a priority, but it wasn’t.  You see, districts have a financial and political disincentive to support SES.  The fewer students who are enrolled, the more money is left for the district to funnel money into the same strategies that failed the students to begin with.  If students can’t or don’t enroll, then districts can label it as failure.  And to be sure, districts do not want SES to work because it would spotlight the deficiencies in the current system.

State Education Agencies also bear a ton of responsibility here.  They were required by law to make the application process rigorous, yet most states require a less than 20-page RFP response.  Most states do not even require an in-person interview with the potential provider to evaluate their capacity (CO being the notable exception.  The state agency there does a 2 hour interview with a cross-functional panel of districts, providers, parent advocates, etc).  SEAs were also required by law to construct evaluation systems and remove ineffective providers after 2 years.  None have done that, although FL and IN have rolled out grading systems which are somewhat narrowly defined.

The notion that SES is wholly ineffective is preposterous.  To suggest that intensive, individualized tutoring to target student skill gaps doesn’t “work” is disingenuous.  If states and districts do their jobs of monitoring and evaluating the programs for effectiveness and weed out the low performing providers, SES holds great promise for mobilizing parents and students to seek out the extra help and supports their students need.