SES: Creating the Future or Endangered Future?
You would think that raising standards and pushing for an extending day and year would be a great time to embrace a couple thousand entrepreneurial organizations that specialize in targeted tutoring and compelling after-school learning. You would think that a disruptive effort to fix or replace the lowest performing schools would be accompanied by an insurance policy of direct support for low income students that have been trapped in low performing schools. You would think that 500,000 low income minority students receiving targeted tutoring sounded like a good idea. However, Supplemental Educational Service (SES) providers are getting the message that they are not needed; more specifically, they are getting the message that school districts want the $3b Title 1 set aside back.
Maybe we just got off on the wrong foot; SES was inserted as what seemed like punishment in a progression of interventions in NCLB and, a result, most districts didn’t do much to market these extended learning opportunities. Where districts embraced SES providers as partners in student success, tailored solutions worked well for schools, kids, and parents.
Yesterday I met with four dozen tutoring organizations–the best in class. They are great at diagnosing learning, tailoring instruction, and hiring and training tutors. Some have created innovative technology solutions. Some have created afterschool programs so compelling that kids don’t want to go home. If we want a more dynamic education system that propels more students to college, we need more entrepreneurs like these SES providers inventing the future of learning. Instead they feel like an endangered species.
The Education Industry Association hosted the SES Forum. I’m a member of EIA and proudly support their efforts to bring innovative scaled solutions to the most challenging circumstances in America.
Posted: February 25th, 2010 | Author: Tom Vander Ark | Filed under: Ed Reform, Innovation | 1 Comment »
Here’s an emailed comment:
I’m an SES provider…You’re dead on. It couldn’t have gotten off on a worse footing with the education establishment. Not just SES, but NCLB was seen as punitive. Schools Eligible for Assistance would have been a better way to characterize schools in need of improvement.
And even though NCLB doubled our state’s Title I budget while only requiring part of that increase to go to SES, the notion that private organizations were stealing from the districts was never addressed.
The program was never explained, let alone ‘sold’ to principals much less teachers. That it came from the Bush administration was just icing on the cake for those who disliked it. Which is to say everyone but the parents and students who benefited from the program. In our case that number is about 5,000 over the years.
Some districts saw the value in it…and those tended to be districts where the Title I directors came from the same socio-economic backgrounds as the families it was intended to serve. Some districts actually saw it as a law that needed to be implemented because that’s what laws are suppose to require. Others fought it was a nastiness that I found genuinely shocking in the world of educated adults. It has been a fascinating learning experience from a unique vantage point. That being from the parent/student point of view as well as the educators’.
And there are flaws. No question. Many of those flaws criticized by educators seem very similar to flaws underlying the poor performance of public education in the very areas where SES-eligible schools are found.
I have maintained that the program was partially intended to determine which type of SES approach worked and that those approaches would be carried on. I think that was naïve. The measurements so disliked by SEAs and LEAs were cloned in measuring SES. Where it was supported, it became another tool in district toolbags for passing the tests. Little thought was given nor any indices created to gauge the impacts on student attitudes and confidence, etc.
Parents were not queried about the program or its impacts on their children. This isn’t the place for me to discuss my observations on how parents are treated but in my view they are given short shrift aside from occasional meetings over report cards which tend to be one-way conversations.
Given this and the expressed outlook on ‘middlemen’, I’m not at all confident in the future of SES. While this means a major change for me and some inconvenience for the 200 – plus teachers and other competent adults who work with us annually – not to mention the students who will be herded into after-school group ‘help’ activities that mirror what has not worked for them well in the previous six hours of their day – I think the saddest aspect is that there will be no effort to see if anything positive came from SES. At all. Just down the memory hole and on to the next educational fad.