More than 7,300 of Chicago’s lowest-performing public school students who were supposed to receive extra help with their studies as required under the federal No Child Left Behind Act have yet to meet with a tutor.
Tutoring should have begun in October for most of these students, who in two months will take the Illinois Standards Achievement Tests, the state’s most important accountability measure.
District officials say they have asked three major vendors that have had trouble getting their programs off the ground–Sylvan Learning Systems, Ed Solutions and The Princeton Review–to resolve any problems and have all tutoring programs in place by the end of the month.
That still leaves little time for coaching before the ISAT is administered in late March.
The difficulty in providing tutors is yet another gap in the reforms mandated by No Child Left Behind, which requires school districts to provide tutors to low-income students in failing schools.
Of the 133,000 students eligible for tutoring this school year, 16,319 signed up for the services in September. About 9,000 of them are receiving the tutoring.
Some vendors say they had difficulty in recruiting teachers; others say they did not have enough time to implement their programs. All agree that the relative newness of the federal law is partly to blame and promise their programs will run much more smoothly next year.
District officials agree the programs were hard to implement quickly but say the vendors also overestimated their capacity to provide services.
In September, Patricia Diaz signed up her 2nd grader and her 4th grader for Sylvan tutoring at Jungman Elementary School in Pilsen. The service finally starts Wednesday.
Diaz was disappointed at the delay because her children need the extra help, especially in math, she said. She also kept her children out of other after-school programming with the expectation that the tutoring would take its place.
“I help them as much as I can, but it would be better for them if they got professional help,” Diaz said in Spanish.
Jungman Principal Zaida Hernandez said that of the three vendors who were to provide tutoring services at the school, only Sylvan has not begun.
Rita Johnson, a member of Jungman’s local school council, said she’s worried about the upcoming standardized tests, which often determine a school’s fate.
“They are in March and here we are at the end of January,” Johnson said. “That’s ridiculous. Here we have all this time when the kids should have gotten instructions but they didn’t.”
Although parents were asked to list three vendors in case their first choice was not available, in many cases the second and third choices also were not an option because of vendor problems, officials said.
Xavier Botana, director of the district’s No Child Left Behind programs, said the vendors are expected to serve about 5,000 more students by the start of the second semester, Feb. 2. The rest will be offered spots in district-run programs, he said.
Free tutoring is the second major provision of the federal reform law, which also is designed to allow children to transfer out of failing schools.
Districts must set aside 20 percent of their federal Title I money to pay for school transfers and tutoring. In Chicago, that was about $47 million this year. The district spent just $2 million on student transfers, leaving $45 million.
Because a relatively small number of students signed up for supplemental services, about $16 million was left over, officials said. That money is being used for after-school classes to help various groups of students, including children retained in grades 3, 6 and 8; special education students; limited-English proficiency students; and those performing in the lowest quartile in reading or math.
Chicago Public Schools chief Arne Duncan said that next year he would like to create a more competitive mix of tutoring suppliers, including non-profit community groups along with private firms and the school district’s own programs.
In addition, Duncan said he wants to contact parents earlier about tutoring services and not wait for state officials to send the list of schools that must offer tutoring. Last year, Chicago schools didn’t send letters to parents until the end of summer.
“That is nowhere near enough time, and that is part of the reason things started late this year,” Duncan said. “I can’t wait that long and I will not wait that long this year. We plan to send out letters much, much earlier, perhaps as early as this spring.”
Sylvan, the district’s largest provider of the special tutoring, began to provide its services in December and expects that more than 90 percent of the programs will be in place by the end of January, said company president Jeffrey Cohen.
“Keep in mind that it was in the fall that we were told how many students we had in the programs,” Cohen said.
He said the company has hired and trained more than 400 teachers and that about 7,700 children signed up for their services. “There are challenges in implementing a brand-new law where there are a lot of unknowns,” Cohen said.
Although some providers said part of the reason for the delay is a shortage of tutors, 3rd-grade teacher Helen Jonas said that isn’t the whole story.
“When I found out what the pay was, I said forget this,” said Jonas, who teaches at McKay Elementary in Chicago Lawn. “It’s not worth the aggravation that we have to go through during the daytime teaching children who don’t want to be educated and then having to deal with it again for only $22.”
Teachers working in the district’s after-school programs receive a higher wage, she said.
“They are paying this company to be able to hire the same teachers that were doing this job before for a considerably smaller paycheck,” Jonas said. “Why go through Sylvan?”
School officials said vendors are offering teachers $18 to $23 an hour, based on experience. The average hourly rate for the school district is $42 an hour.
Gary Solomon, national director of educational partnerships for The Princeton Review, said all of its tutoring programs were in place before the winter break and blamed the “cumbersome” legislation for the delay. The company expected to serve about 5,000 students, but only 2,800 signed up.
Setting up the tutoring programs has been “an operation nightmare,” said Barbara Spada, vice president of Ed Solutions.
Spada said her firm still has about 15 schools where programs have not started yet. She blames a too-successful marketing campaign–the company ended up with 5,000 students, 3,500 more than anticipated.
Meetings between the involved parties are taking place to resolve the issues, Spada said.
“Next year, it will be easier,” she said. “There are real attempts to iron out the problems so we don’t have a repeat.”
This is the second year that free tutoring is being offered in schools across the state. Last year, the tutoring program didn’t start until after the ISAT and was only six weeks long. This year it will last about 20 weeks, officials said.
District officials say they do not know the total number of students who signed up for tutoring because some registered after the deadline. They expect to get final numbers this week from the 219 schools that were required to offer supplemental services.
