Maryland students benefit significantly more than most students nationwide from No Child Left Behind tutoring programs, a state school administrator testified on Capitol Hill Wednesday.
Maryland’s model tutoring program was among three presented to a House Committee on Education and Labor subcommittee in a hearing to consider ways to improve the quality of and access to No Child Left Behind’s supplemental education services program.
Congress is now considering reauthorization of the federal NCLB program and so is examining the federal education plan in multiple ways.
“We are never content with compliance. We always with our children try to ensure compliance, and pass that on to excellence. And I think we are on the way to doing that with our SES program,” said Ann E. Chafin, assistant state superintendent.
“I have to say up front that this takes enormous planning and enormous resources to be able to ensure that this program is what is appropriate for each of our children.”
The No Child Left Behind Act requires that districts with schools that receive “Title I” financial assistance, but that have not met state performance goals for three consecutive years, offer low-income students additional educational services, like tutoring. Title 1 funding is designed to help schools with high percentages of poor students meet state academic standards.
Panelists testifying before the subcommittee included three school system representatives, a civil rights advocate and a federal director of education issues.
They addressed how participation in tutoring programs has changed in the past six years, how providers can better work with districts to deliver such services, how states monitor and evaluate the system, and how the U.S. Department of Education monitors program implementation nationwide.
Wednesday’s hearing will play a critical role in the committee’s efforts to understand how NCLB provisions are working and where they can be implemented or improved to ensure that every student receives “a world-class education,” said subcommittee Chairman Dale Kildee, D-Mich.
This school year, No Child Left Behind provided $12.7 billion in federal funds to more than 50,000 public schools nationwide to improve the education of low-income students, said Cornelia M. Ashby, the General Accounting Office’s director of education, workforce and income security issues.
Participation in the tutoring component for this year has not yet been calculated. But the year before, participation nationwide jumped from 12 to 19 percent, still a far cry from Maryland’s 68 percent average usage.
State-sponsored tutoring programs are working in Maryland, Chafin said. She attributed Maryland’s success to the state’s rigorous application process, selection and review of tutoring providers.
“We started out not as rigorous as we are now,” Chafin said. “We’ve learned from every year’s experience.”
Today’s providers must present goals for their supplemental reading and mathematics programs, and show how they align closely with Maryland’s voluntary state curriculum, Chafin said.
“We want to be sure that the services being provided to the students actually will advantage them when they face the assessment programs and the instruction going on. There should be a match.”
A Jan. 23 article in Education Daily referred to Maryland’s monitoring sys