.Career Opportunities

No Child Left Behind set off a gold rush for tutoring companies, but California isn't keeping up.

Under the high ceilings and fluorescent lights of Maxwell Park Elementary School last September, eight private tutoring companies competed for the attention of LaMonica Bell. Like other parents with children in Oakland’s underperforming schools, Bell had the right to choose a publicly financed tutor for her two kids. What she didn’t know was that some of her choices had twice failed to meet the state’s criteria for tutors.

Private tutoring is a cornerstone of No Child Left Behind, the 2001 federal law that sought to make every US public school student proficient in math and reading by 2014. Federally funded tutoring becomes available to low-income students when their schools fail to pass yearly improvement goals on statewide tests.

In states that have warmed to and regulated the program, such as Florida, officials say it has helped them improve some of their worst-performing schools. But a look at how tutoring works in California finds problems at almost every step.

Parents have no good ways to determine a company’s effectiveness. Some industry marketing targets students with baubles and prizes as a way to sell their parents. Tutors aren’t required to have any minimum level of education or training. The state Department of Education has lowered its accreditation standards for the industry on two separate occasions. Only a fraction of eligible children sign up for tutoring in most districts.

Consequently, instead of helping low-income students, in California the funding boom has created what the president of one company called a “wild, wild West” of tutoring. Some companies offer legitimate, researched-based skill-building. But others offer little more than glorified babysitting.

Although free to students, these programs come at a cost to schools. The money comes from the funding used to provide extra assistance for schools with a high proportion of low-income students. District administrators and principals are normally able to use these funds on internal spending priorities. Yet when a school fails to demonstrate adequate yearly progress on state standardized tests for three consecutive years, 5 to 20 percent of this money must be set aside for private tutoring.

Yet there’s a loophole. If parents fail to sign up their children for tutoring, the money goes back to the school district and can be redirected for other purposes. This funding formula has created a “perverse incentive” for cash-strapped districts to undermine tutoring rather than embrace it, warns Steve Pines, the executive director of the Education Industries Association, a trade group. “They have figured out if they don’t use all the money, they can recapture the dollars for their own use,” Pines said. For instance, last year Oakland set aside $3.7 million for tutoring, but didn’t use $1.1 million of that money. District staff could not produce records showing where the money went.

In essence, No Child Left Behind privatized tutoring at failing public schools. The program was what conservatives got in place of the more extreme privatization that backers of educational vouchers had hoped for. And for that reason, it is still bitterly opposed by many educators. “You’re essentially taking money out of school classrooms,” said Joel Packer, a spokesperson for the National Education Association, which opposes the way in which the program is funded. On the other hand, Oakland mother and tutoring proponent Kim Shipp complained that “teachers’ unions, school districts, and the media … look at it as ‘the federal government has taken a portion of our money and has shoved this program down our throats’.”

Despite the reluctance of many educators to embrace the law, the pools of money it sets aside have given rise to scads of new tutoring companies. The number of approved providers in California has mushroomed 78 percent since 2002 to 214. And even the industry’s own lobbyist believes it is too easy for anyone to enter the field. “Every provider who gets in the door ought to be excellent,” said Pines, who lobbies Congress on behalf of tutoring companies. “Right now, I think the door is open too widely.”

Others would say the door is completely off its hinges — at least in California.

No Child Left Behind spawned a cottage industry of “ramshackle organizations to collect the money that was raining from the sky,” said Manny Lopez, a teacher at the Global Family School in Oakland and a secretary for the teachers’ union, the Oakland Education Association. “It appeals to moneymaking individuals, and it’s not about the children.”

Jack McAboy, the owner of the Piedmont franchise of Sylvan Learning Center, an agency that typically gets positive reviews from teachers and parents, agrees. He said the rush for tutoring dollars resembles the “wild, wild West.” “There are people who come out of the woodwork chasing money, who are not really qualified to deliver,” he said.

Money is indeed a big motivator for agencies that hope to tap into the state’s $158 million tutoring budget. For each child a company signs up in Oakland this year it receives $1,179.70, down from last year’s $1,293.

“Some of the companies are decent and well-intentioned,” said Elizabeth Ozol, principal of New Highland Academy in Oakland. “And other ones seem like they’re taking advantage of a niche. They’re a little more mercenary.”

Several companies engage in marketing that raises the eyebrows of school employees and parents. “Some advertise that kids will win a gift card or an expensive toy,” Ozol said. “It seems like not a very ethical way to recruit families.”

Parents report mixed feelings about all the goodies. “To hell with all these erasers, my son needs academics,” Bell said. “I need him to be ready for college.”


When LaMonica Bell heard that she could choose a private tutor for her son, she wasted no time signing up. But for her and other parents, it has been a bewildering experience.

Bell chose Sylvan Learning Center for her son because she recognized the name. “God knows if they’re better than any others,” she joked. As it turns out, Sylvan is regarded as effective by teachers and principals, but Bell said her decision was based on name recognition and little else.

Part of what makes the process confusing — the sheer number of providers — is built into a core notion of No Child Left Behind. It’s the idea of choice. “Giving parents as much choices as possible is overwhelming,” said Oakland Unified School District tutoring program manager Niambi Clay. “It’s too confusing to look at a chart of fifty different organizations. The parents are kind of choosing in the dark.”

This year, Oakland parents had a list of 31 private tutoring companies to choose from. Parents also had the option of attending “provider fairs” like the one at Maxwell Park, where tutor companies set up colorful booths to market themselves to parents.

“All of them are basically the same,” said Sonya Richardson, a parent of Maxwell Park Elementary first grader Malaya Green, who attended a tutoring fair in September. But tutoring companies are not all the same. Some are nonprofit while some are for-profit; some go to students’ homes, some to their schools, and some require students to come to off-site locations. Some emphasize teacher-student interaction, while others use computer programs to teach with limited assistance from teachers.

Providers charge rates that range from $15 to $100 per hour. Students receive between twelve and 78 hours of tutoring, depending on the rates providers charge. Some companies use only credentialed teachers, while others only require tutors to have a high school diploma. Tutor-to-student ratios vary from 1:1 to 1:12.

Companies have drastically different philosophies. For example, Tutor Owl employs tutors living in India who communicate with students one-to-one over the Internet. Since Tutor Owl charges only $19.50 per hour, a student would get 60 hours of instruction for their $1,179 allocation. None of Tutor Owl’s tutors have an American teaching credential.

Alternatively, a parent might choose A+ Educational Services, which offers one-on-one in-person tutoring for $80 an hour. With A+, a student would receive only fourteen hours of instruction. According to the company, 20 percent of their tutors are certified teachers.

Or a parent might choose Applied Scholastics, a program based on the learning theories of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard. At $40 per hour, a student would get 29 hours of instruction. Six percent of this agency’s tutors are certified to teach, according to the agency.

Spanish-speaking parents have an even harder time wading through the selection process. Gloria Vargas, a bilingual mother of four children and an after-school coordinator associated with the charter school Education for Change Achieve Academy, said she’s helped many such parents fill out applications. Approximately 22 percent of Oakland’s students speak Spanish at home, but often schools and providers don’t have someone like Vargas to help.

In Oakland, where the number of schools considered to be “failing” has more than tripled to 61 since 2003, educators said they wish they could help parents whittle down the choices — a step that’s prohibited by federal law. “I think it’s easier if principals initially take the list and see which providers are aligned with school goals and have their own recommendations for parents,” said Clay. “But at this point they’re not allowed to do that.” Clay said her district can’t help narrow the choices, either. It’s required by the state to contract with any provider that appears on the pre-approved list.

Instead, parents choose a tutor on their own. To the uninitiated, this might seem like a guarantee against unscrupulous and ineffective providers, but it’s not. In fact, most of the tutoring companies on the state’s list for the 2007-08 academic year failed to meet California’s initial criteria for approval. Education officials responded to this situation by dramatically lowering their standards.

More than 200 private tutoring organizations applied to the state Department of Education last year. Each had to demonstrate that its academic program was rooted in educational research, that its staff members were trained and capable, and that it had a track record of boosting student achievement. To win approval, applicants had to earn at least 32 out of 40 points from three anonymous reviewers.

Yet when only eleven companies passed, state officials responded by lowering the bar to 21.5 points and adding 183 companies that initially failed to meet their criteria.

“Like all things, you start out with an idealistic notion of how it should be,” said William Padia, a deputy superintendent with the California Department of Education. He acknowledged that department officials looked at the data and made appropriate adjustments, but said he did not believe the state had lowered quality “to the point that it could be detrimental.”

But officials in Oakland disagreed. Three companies — Mathnasium, Girls Moving Forward, and Education Station — failed to meet even the lower bar, yet eventually gained approval and currently are operating in Oakland. They were offered to parents like LaMonica Bell without any special note on their approval troubles.

Education Station earned more than $900,000 tutoring Oakland students during the 2006-7 academic year. District officials said the company was the subject of complaints from teachers, principals, and parents, and scored within the “inadequate” range on three out of four sections of the application, according to a score sheet attached to its state application.

One Oakland district employee, who asked to remain anonymous because she’s been told not to criticize approved providers, said she made a special effort to get Education Station removed from the state’s list. In a letter to state officials, she accused the company of violating rules meant to protect parents from overzealous marketing, and passed on a slew of complaints from teachers and principals about the company’s performance.

Yet instead of removing Education Station from the list, state officials gave it another chance. Along with Girls Moving Forward and Mathnasium, the company was invited to present its program to a new review panel, said Maria Reyes of the state Department of Education. All three companies were approved by the State Board of Education in September.

The Oakland official couldn’t understand why the state would ignore complaints. “There’s no real mechanism to say ‘Please do not give us this provider,'” the employee said.

Education Station regional manager Bill Kuljam acknowledged his company’s failures and said every employee in the Northern California division was fired after complaints poured in. “We pretty much cleaned house,” he said.

Still, it’s unclear what will happen if complaints resume this year. Although federal regulations allow states to remove ineffective companies from their list of approved providers, that hasn’t ever happened in California, despite feedback such as the Oakland letter.

“I don’t know why California hasn’t gotten its act together,” said Pines, who noted that other states have robust tutor evaluation methods and higher rates of student participation than California, where only 8 percent of eligible students participate.


Deputy Education Superintendent Padia said he is confident California has good providers. “The real issue,” he said, “is: can they produce?”

But Padia’s question is impossible to answer in California, which unlike other states has failed to develop a system to assess a provider’s impact on student learning.

In California, school performance under No Child Left Behind is determined by scores on the state’s standardized tests. But, unlike other states, standardized test scores for individual students are not tracked in California, so it is impossible to know if tutored students are improving.

Industry lobbyist Pines said that if a particular provider’s students don’t make progress, that company should be removed from the state’s list. “That is the beauty of the program,” he said.

That hasn’t happened in California. Not a single provider has ever been removed from the list, according to Jerry Cummings, the state education official who oversees the tutor program. And Clay said it won’t happen until state officials establish a reliable way to assess providers. “If the law says that the state is responsible for evaluation, I think they need to find a way to do that,” she said.

The state Department of Education allocates just three part-time employees to administer the tutoring program for a state that boasts 35 percent of the nation’s eligible students. “There’s no money in No Child Left Behind to support state or local monitoring and evaluation,” said Pines, who believes 1 percent of tutor funds should be set aside to run the program. “Many states and school districts don’t have the infrastructure to carry out their obligations.”

Meanwhile, tutoring companies are required to report data showing their effectiveness to the California Department of Education, but the data is self-reported. “Providers are required to do a pre- and post-test, but they can use whatever test they want,” said Gail Sunderman, a senior education researcher of UCLA’s Civil Rights Project. “It can lead to all sorts of inflation.”

Added Henry Hitz, who helped develop the program for the nonprofit Oakland tutoring firm Art, Research, and Curriculum Associates, “What is alarming is that programs already in place are not being evaluated and not showing progress. It’s kind of scary.”

Monica Wilson, the after-school coordinator at Maxwell Park Elementary, said “I have yet to see any proven success. They’re all claiming success, but never show me statistics.”

State education officials said that figuring out which tutor companies are effective — and jettisoning the ineffective ones — is high on their list of priorities. But only now, six years after Congress passed No Child Left Behind, are they working with partners to develop an assessment for providers. That pilot program is in the early stages of planning, and no date has been set for its launch.

Oakland tried to help local parents identify effective providers by hiring an outside consulting group to survey parents, teachers, and principals. The survey was completed and paid for, but Clay said state officials refused to allow the district to give parents the results. “They said it looked bad for some providers,” she said.

Reyes, with the Department of Education, said the state would not have objected to such a survey. “That’s perfectly acceptable,” she said. Reyes added that she didn’t know “exactly what transpired” with the Oakland survey, but doubted that the state would have advised the district not to use such a survey. Clay said that the employee who was told not to distribute the survey no longer works for the district. She declined to provide a copy of the survey to a reporter.

Once parents have selected a provider, the next step is often waiting and wondering. In her role as an after-school coordinator at Education for Change, Gloria Vargas said she’s worked with parents who never heard from their chosen companies after signing up. “The whole year would pass and they never hear from the company,” she said. “Or six months would pass and then they get a letter saying ‘Show up here.'”

Many students who qualify for the program don’t end up going anywhere. Of the roughly 14,000 students who were eligible for free tutoring services last year, only 27 percent signed up in Oakland. This year, some 17,000 students were eligible, and only 17.5 percent have enrolled.

“The services are underutilized because parents either don’t know or they aren’t as convenient as they could be,” said Melia Franklin, executive director of Parent Leadership Action Network.

And the programs don’t even begin until January. “That’s dumb,” said Bell. “Especially if your child is doing bad early on. You start to slip behind and you never catch up.” Monica Wilson, after-school coordinator at Maxwell Park Elementary, agreed. “Don’t wait until the children are far below basic to make this happen,” she said.


Once tutoring begins, communication between tutoring companies, parents, and schools varies from great to poor. Sonya Richardson was very pleased with Bright Futures, the provider she chose last year for her five-year-old daughter. She said they sent her weekly progress reports and met with her and her daughter’s teacher regularly. “It worked out great,” she said.

Wilson had an entirely different experience with Bright Futures, which is not operating in Oakland this year. She said the provider started later in the year than scheduled, two of the tutors quit, and they ended up providing only about four sessions. “It just wasn’t a good turnout,” she said.

Wilson said she found unsupervised students hanging out on school grounds several times when they were supposed to be in tutoring sessions because the tutors were late. “They were just left hanging there,” she said.

That kind of comment is all too common among program observers. Teacher Manny Lopez, who used to teach at the now-closed E. Morris Cox Elementary, said he regularly saw students who were supposed to be in tutoring sessions running around without supervision. He blames this on an undiscerning system that allows unqualified tutors into the classroom.

Bright Futures district manager Richard Garcia said he didn’t know about the particulars of last year, but that tutors quitting and programs starting later than expected is “part of any experience.”

Kim Shipp, a parent and former chair of Oakland’s District Advisory Council who also has a private consulting business connected to tutoring, sees parent education as the solution to many of these problems: “Until there is some concentrated effort put forth on educating parents on this process — what it means for them and their child, it will be very difficult to have sustained effectiveness.”

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