Supplemental Education Services under NCLB: Emerging Evidence and Policy Issues

Education Services, a key component of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act, has

been adopted and implemented with little evidence to support its effectiveness

according to a new policy brief funded by the Great Lakes Center for Education

Research and Practice.

The policy brief, “Supplemental Education Services under

NCLB: Emerging Evidence and Policy Issues,” is by Patricia Burch, Ph.D of the

University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The brief examines the supplemental education services

(SES) provision of NCLB, which requires school districts to pay the cost of

after-school tutoring services for eligible students attending schools that have

failed to meet mandated Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) benchmarks three years in

a row. Those schools must set aside up to 20 percent of their Title I funds to

pay for third-party tutoring services provided by state-approved providers.

Currently, this field of providers is dominated by private, for-profit

companies.

The report finds that SES programs have low participation

rates and offer limited services for English Language Learners and special

education students. It also finds that states and school districts lack the

capacity to offer significant monitoring or accountability for SES programs—in

stark contrast to the NCLB law’s strict accountability measures applied to the

schools themselves.

The report emphasizes the overwhelming lack of evidence to

support (or refute) the wisdom of the SES policy. The report states, “existing

research offers little information about specific conditions that support

positive outcomes” from supplemental education services provided under the law.

“To make well-informed decisions in the future, policy makers will require

additional empirical evidence.”

The report recommends policy makers redesign NCLB to commission

federally funded studies that assess the effectiveness of SES programs and their

accessibility to at-risk students. It also offers concrete recommendations for

amending NCLB to assist local school districts and state education agencies

in administering SES programs.

The full policy brief is available at http://www.greatlakescenter.org .

The mission of

the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice is to identify,

develop, support, publish and widely disseminate empirically sound

research on education policy and practices designed to improve the quality

of public education for all students within the Great Lakes Region.

Visit the Great Lakes

Center website at: http://www.greatlakescenter.or g

Contact:
Patricia Burch – (303) 492-8370; pburch@wisc.edu