Originally published on December 13, 2010 at 4:02PM MST.
Accountability and results. That’s what school reform à la NCLB and RTTT is supposed to be all about, right? In order to ensure that all kids are getting the education they need and deserve, we need to set high goals and expectations, and then “measure to see if we’re gettin’ results.“ When we measure (and measure and measure…), and find that we’re not getting results, we have to do something about it. That’s the primary justification for turnarounds where teachers are fired en masse, and when schools are closed or converted to charters.
So why doesn’t this same hard-line approach seem to apply to supplemental educational services (SES) providers? The No Child Left Behind act stipulates that low-income children in low-performing schools are entitled to receive tutoring to help bring them up to grade level, at no expense to their families. States are expected to remove vendors from their approved provider lists if they fail to show results for two straight years, but this is rarely done. As a result, these SES providers have received large sums of public money to help students, even though they are often labeled as “ineffective” or “needs improvement” (the same kinds of labels that trigger state intervention, turnaround, and closure for public schools). In some cases, there is even evidence of fraud and other wrong-doing.
For instance, Ohio parent advocate Bernadine Kent recently wrote to me about the shady dealings between the SES providers serving needy students in Columbus and the Columbus City School District and school board. Though only four of the city’s 72 SES vendors received an “effective” rating, all continued to collect large sums of taxpayer money. From the article she co-wrote in The Free Press (emphasis added):
Throughout the rest of the article (which includes video documentation as well as documents gathered by Kent and her husband, fellow parent advocate James Whitaker), they explore some of the suspicious activities related to the way poorly rated SES providers have been paid by the district, and highlight red flags that have been overlooked by the city’s school board. These include suspicions of price-fixing (see video below), evidence of suspicious operations (vendors who lack physical addresses, providers using handwritten invoices instead of computer-generated ones), and district officials bypassing the normal processes for purchases of this nature.
