Education Week: NCLB Tutoring, But Not Transfers, Found to Help Student Scores

That's the headline for today. Read beyond the headline to get some details. First, only a few large, urban school districts were studied. (It's easier to get outside tutoring services, transportation, and a whole lot of other things there.) Second, the effects of tutoring were small -- a reliable effect, but a small one. Here's the beginning of the article. Click the link to read the whole thing at EdWeek.

By Debra Viadero
A new federal study looking at tutoring and student-transfer provisions under the federal No Child Left Behind law suggests that those policy changes are having mixed success so far in boosting students’ academic achievement in reading and mathematicsRequires Adobe Acrobat Reader.

According to the study, which tracked the progress of the 5-year-old federal program in nine large urban school districts, students who participated in the NCLB tutoring, on average, learned more in the first year of tutoring than they had in previous years. And, while those academic gains were small, they tended to grow when students stuck with their tutors for two years or more.

On the other hand, pupils who transferred to other schools under the NCLB choice provision did no better, on average, than they had in their previous schools, according to the study, which was released June 27.
The study is the first federally funded evaluation of the NCLB’s school choice and supplemental educational services (SES) provisions to examine how those programs are affecting student achievement, rather than how or whether educators are implementing them.