Florida hands out millions of dollars to ex-convicts, profiteers, and crooks to tutor poor kids.
People who would never be hired to teach in a public school because of their criminal history are paid as much as $60 an hour to tutor needy students.
The program has no accountability or quality.
The next time you hear boasting about Florida, think of this story. Privatization opens the public treasury to corruption. It’s predictable.
Another step backward for American education.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The same typical results of privatization. Profits trump all. Who cares about quality and consistency. The private sector knows how to do everything better blah, blah, blah.. what a waste!!!
DeeDee, but but but…you wouldn’t want to kill the spirit of edupreneurship, would you? Think of all the innovative eduproducts just yearning to breath free under deregulation, ready to produce ROI excellencies beyond the imagination of every lazy LIFO now taking up space in classrooms across this country.
Beware the slippery slope! Next thing you know, you’ll surrender to the noxious notion that Michelle Rhee’s claim to be one of the greatest teachers of her—or any other—generation is in dispute.
Trust me, I’m only telling you this for your own good.
🙂
The school-to-prison pipeline corporate privateers investing in the future!..Just makes good business sense, don’t you think? So very much like the United Republic of Russia. (((Are Floridians outraged yet???)))
I wasn’t aware that NCLB required private tutoring for students. I thought that schools had to offer assistance to students, but not that it had to be from private companies. Can anyone clarify this point or point me to where this mandate is located, please?
The program is called Supplemental Education Services (SES) and states are required to set aside moneys from their budgets to pay for these services in schools that fail to make adequate yearly progress (AYP). Conveniently, the number of schools making AYP grows exponentially every year, which leads to more moneys being set aside and more tutoring companies needed to meet demands. Lots and lots of profit potential, which, of course, has been exploited by some (many?) unscrupulous providers, who stand to make small fortunes for very little in the way of providing effective tutoring.
Here is a link to the actual words of the SES section of the NCLB law:
http://www2.ed.gov/policy/elsec/leg/esea02/pg2.html#ses
“(1) SUPPLEMENTAL EDUCATIONAL SERVICES– In the case of any school described in paragraph (5), (7), or (8) of subsection (b), the local educational agency serving such school shall, subject to this subsection, arrange for the provision of supplemental educational services to eligible children in the school from a provider with a demonstrated record of effectiveness, that is selected by the parents and approved for that purpose by the State educational agency in accordance with reasonable criteria, consistent with paragraph (5), that the State educational agency shall adopt.”
Parents are free to choose any provider that they like from a list of state-approved providers. The messiness is seated in how individual states have interpreted the law’s requirements of who can be a provider: Florida, it was recently revealed, has provided little to no oversight and has treated the program in a traditional Republican laisez-faire, free market that will take care of itself with little to no regulation or accountability measures. The attitude seems to be that if parents are not satisfied they will choose a different provider in the future. No thought seems to be given to the lost time, lost resources, and futility of ineffective tutoring.
Yes this is one of the biggest failures under NCLB. Rather than fund before and after school programs in the schools, and allow the children’s teachers to provide additional individual and small group instruction, the schools are forced to hand resources over to any organization that hangs out a shingle claiming that they know what they are doing. What a scam and a waste.