Tutors off target

Some question value of federally obligated services

By Christian Gaston

The Portland Tribune, Nov 13, 2008, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (12 Reader comments)

L.E. BASKOW / TRIBUNE PHOTO

Club Z is one of five companies that provides after-school tutoring to students at three district schools, including Lane Middle School (above).

When Heather Evanson applied for a tutoring job on Craigslist in September, she was hoping that she’d be able to help disadvantaged kids get ahead and burnish her résumé a bit.

Instead, she stepped into the Wild West of the seven-year-old federal education law, No Child Left Behind.

Evanson signed up as an English tutor with Club Z, a for-profit tutoring firm that Portland Public Schools pays through federal funds to help students at struggling schools.

The work fit with her schedule – Tuesday and Thursday afternoons – and although the trek from her home in Tigard to George Middle School in North Portland wasn’t ideal, she was excited to get started.

But when she showed up for her first day of work, she was shuttled from a bustling cafeteria into a classroom and told to wait as the company’s coordinators shuttled around the school ironing out details.

“It was just tutors and students, totally lost,” Evanson said. “None of us knew what was going on.”

A half-hour after the tutoring was supposed to begin, Evanson finally was assigned an eighth-grader to work with and handed a math workbook.

When Evanson said she was there to teach English, she was handed a different book and told to start.

After less than an hour of reading vocabulary words, Evanson was told to see if her student needed any help with his homework.

But her student didn’t have any English homework. In fact, he had requested a math tutor.

The next week, she wrote an e-mail to Neil Buchan, who runs the local Club Z franchise, saying that she was resigning.

“It is my understanding that the students enrolled in this program have qualified for tutoring because, in one way or another, they are already at a disadvantage,” Evanson wrote. “I feel that by not providing them with a more structured environment that suits their learning needs, it is a further disservice to them.”

Buchan said Evanson’s experience isn’t representative of his company’s work. He also said that since Evanson quit, her student has been matched up with a math tutor.

But critics of the Club Z tutoring program – and of similar No Child Left Behind tutoring programs nationwide – question how much good the programs really do. They have no question about one thing: the programs are costing taxpayers loads of money.

Contracts are lucrative

Last year, Club Z pulled in more than $138,000 from federal funds to have tutors like Evanson provide after-school help to about 80 kids at three different Portland schools that the federal law judged to be failing.

The for-profit made that money by charging $38 an hour for its tutors’ work – even though it paid the tutors about half that amount.

And this year, Club Z is on pace to make twice as much from its contract with PPS – in part by luring more kids to participate with a promise of free iPods for completing the tutoring program.

When President Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act passed Congress in 2001, the goal was to help students at schools that receive federal Title I dollars, money intended for schools serving mostly students from poor families.

The law established a testing regime that identified failing schools. Districts were required to set aside up to 20 percent of the Title I money they receive to pay to transfer students out of those schools and provide free tutoring services for the kids who stayed at the schools.

But Patricia Burch, an assistant professor of education policy studies at University Wisconsin-Madison, said a lack of any real oversight of the tutoring programs has allowed poor-performing vendors to maintain lucrative tutoring contracts while doing little or nothing to help kids.

“This focus on more academic instruction, extending the school day, that all makes perfect sense,” Burch said. “But how it’s played out is just a joke in comparison to the vision.”

Much tutoring lacks focus

Burch is working on a book about how after-school tutoring under No Child Left Behind – known as supplemental education services, or SES – is performing nationwide and sat in on a number of tutoring sessions during her research.

“What we saw many of these vendors doing was what we call ‘more school,’ ” Burch said. “A lot of seat work, a lot of unfocused homework help.

“What we saw was more of the same, just a replication of some of the worst practices in the schools,” Burch said.

Officials with the tutoring companies, however, defend their work, saying that the families they serve wouldn’t be able to afford a tutor without government help.

Most students they serve are eligible for free or reduced-price lunches – a common barometer for family poverty – “and would never be able to afford to pay for a tutor to come over to their house and improve their reading,” Club Z’s Buchan said. “I think they would all tell you that it’s worth the taxpayer money.”

Last school year, Portland Public Schools paid five contractors $328,908 to provide tutoring services to 232 students at the three schools – George, Lane and Binnsmead middle schools. Each of the contractors competed to tutor students at each of the three schools.

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