Will changing the teacher change the scores?

A look at after-school tutoring of at-risk students under NCLB,
otherwise known as No Cash Left Behind or Grab It While We Can

major piece of No Child Left Behind is the element requiring a school "in need of improvement" for three successive years to offer its low-income students after-school tutoring.

The inherent suggestion in this strategy is that changing teachers will change the scores, something private education companies have been making this claim for years. Claims are one thing, reality is another and the early results — in both scores and costs — indicate the war on ignorance in the schools is running into some of the same problems as the war in Iraq: Strategists have greatly underestimated the community response and the costs.

Despite the fact that NCLB requires only evidence-based (scientific) instruction, a New York Times story¹ ("For Children Being Left behind, Private Tutors Face Rocky Start," by Sam Dillon, April 16, 2004) reports a dearth of research on the effectiveness of private sector after-school tutoring, especially on the massive scale that will be required in urban America where the scores are lowest.

More than 1,000 private companies and their part-time employees have accepted the invitation of the federal government to take advantage of $2 billion in federal education funds (taxpayer dollars: $40-$80 an hour per student), money that is normally designated for Title I students. (The very clear and profitable connection between big business and school testing can be seen here in "Having your cake and eating it, too," which explores President Bush's education advisor's conflicting role as a paid lobbyist for some of the major education publishing firms.)

One unanticipated result of the NCLB Act is that districts lose money (20 percent) from their Title I budgets and see it transferred to private sector companies like Sylvan Learning Solutions and The Princeton Review. One prediction for the fall of 2004 is that some districts will see their faculty numbers fall while tutor numbers rise.

Exacerbating that situation are school districts that are burdened with the extra responsibility to schedule and coordinate all the tutoring. A February 2004 report from Harvard's Civil Rights Project, examining the law's impact on 11 districts, found its administrative burden to be overwhelmingly unfair and ineffective. (See Harvard for more on the study and a link to the original report.)

On the other hand, inconveniences and expense might be worth it if the tutoring actually improved student learning. Is there any research to substantiate that premise? There is an occasional report from people like Dr. Lloyd Sain, director of supplemental instruction in Little Rock, Arkansas, who said his district's 90 risk-students "did make a gain, despite how shaggy and fragmented the programs were." While not a ringing endorsement, it wasn't a death-knell either.Novice tutors are like soldiers without combat experience, easily overwhelmed in the streets of a foreign country.

One might say the private sector tutoring element of NCLB is the "weapon of mass instruction" the Bush administration is betting a big piece of its education bank on. The flaw in that theory, however, may be as large as the one that predicted the Iraqi people would gratefully lay down their tribal and religious differences and welcome U.S. troops with open arms.

To begin with, while the tutoring costs from $40-$80 dollars an hour per pupil, the bulk of that money goes to the private company. Its tutors are drawing $18-$25 an hour, well below the pay of a regular classroom teacher. Thus the tutoring ranks often are filled by young music and art teachers intent on either doing good and/or picking up extra income. While veteran teachers, deep in experience with troubled learners, are a rarity in the tutor ranks, the success of NCLB's tutoring concept is based solely on research that connected experienced, highly trained teachers to at-risk students — not novices.

The high standards for tutors were set by President Bush's reading czar Dr. G. Reid Lyon, chief of the Child Development and Behavior Branch of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Writing in the March, 2004, issue of Educational Leadership,² Lyon and one of his scientists set the following teacher standard for correcting reading woes in children: "As Moats (1999) points out, because of the complexity of learning to read, teaching reading is clearly the job for an expert; in fact, she compares it to rocket science."³ Since the vast majority of children learn to read without "rocket scientist" instructors, it appears that Dr. Lyon has overstated the case greatly. Perhaps he should have said, "Because of the complexity of teaching at-risk children to read, teaching reading is clearly the job for an expert."

Nonetheless, one look at the legions of instructors descending on urban after-school programs will tell you the "rocket scientists" are far and few between. Big problem there. (Not everyone agrees with Lyon's standard for reading teachers, although he does speak for Reading First; also worth noting is the expert Lyon cites [Moats] is one of his employees writing a guest article in the journal of the American Federation of Teachers. Should he have identified her as a member of NICHHD instead of inferring by his incomplete footnoting that she was representative of a national teachers' union? I believe so. The footnoting below is mine. (Lyon's footnote read: Moats, L. C. [1999]). Teaching reading is rocket science. Washington, DC: American Federation of Teachers. When Reading First was up and running, Lyon took off for the private sector where he sat comfortably until the Department of Education's Inspector General began investigating the people he left behind. Then the media were pointing mikes and fingers at him while he claimed none of it happened on his watch.)

till on the subject of tutor credentials and the need for experienced teachers, in the same issue of Educational Leadership, Drs. Sally and Bennett Shaywitz (the former a member of the National Reading Panel which wrote the Reading First plank in NCLB) pointed to an experiment in which second- and third-grade dyslexic readers were given 50 minutes of daily systematic and explicit tutoring for eight months under the supervision of a Syracuse University professor. The result was "significant gains in reading fluency" by the following year. The Shaywitzes note: "Certified teachers who had taken part in an intensive training program provided the tutoring."⁴ Doesn't sound like the tutoring cast in urban public schools, does it?

Just as novice soldiers without combat experience can be overwhelmed in the streets of a foreign country, the novice tutors face a similar task when confronting unruly students forced into an after-school curriculum. As a result, the tutoring ranks quickly thin and classes see a parade of different faces. Since many come from schools with the highest faculty turnovers, this becomes a case of "same-ol', same-ol'." That theme continues with student enrollment: Of the 6,000 children enrolled in the Chicago program, only 2,300 appeared for class. That comes as no surprise to veteran educators who know that students with the lowest scores often have the highest absentee rates.

Even if the student attends, there's no guarantee he or she will be attentive. As The New York Times⁵ reported:

Princeton tutors have frequently ejected unruly students from the class, forcing Ms. Strickland, a public school employee, to baby-sit, she said. Other days no Princeton tutor has shown up, forcing her to watch the entire class, she said.

Wasi Young, a poet and musician who taught for Princeton Review here from January until he quit in March said: "It was extremely hard to get those kids' attention. They were boisterous and shouting from the day I walked into the class."

Richard Allington, one of America's more respected reading researchers has been at odds with many of the findings and shaky procedures used by Reading First, not the least of which is Dr. Lyon's boast to Congress: "We have learned that for 90 to 95 percent of poor readers, prevention and early intervention programs that combine instruction in phoneme awareness, phonics, fluency development, and reading comprehension strategies, provided by well-trained teachers, can increase reading skills to average reading levels."⁵

Lyon's testimony provided no research citation for the "90-95 percent" assertion, so Allington dug and found a paper coauthored by Lyon in which he made that same claim and used the following two studies in support: Torgesen, Wagner, & Rashotte, 1997⁶; Vellutino et al., 1996.⁷

But when Allington went to those studies, the results were a far cry from Lyon's claims. Writing in Educational Leadership⁸, Allington explained:

   Vellutino and colleagues studied approximately 200 at-risk primary grade students from six suburban school districts. They divided the students into two groups: treatment and control. The treatment students received individual, expert tutoring for one semester, typically for 30 minutes per day, for an average total of 70–80 sessions. Some students continued to receive tutoring for a longer period. Almost half (44.7 percent) of the tutored students achieved average reading levels (the 45th percentile) after tutoring.
    Torgesen and colleagues provided 20-minute tutoring sessions four days a week for two and one-half years to approximately 100 primary grade students. Teachers and aides provided daily tutoring on an alternating basis. Tutored students received one of three possible interventions, each of which produced similar outcomes on the word reading tests.
    Although the Vellutino and Torgesen interventions did demonstrate the power of intensive, expert tutoring, the outcomes indicated that these interventions raised roughly 50 percent of the poor readers — not 90–95 percent — to the 45th percentile or above, or to average reading levels.

Despite the sizeable difference between the Lyon expectation (90-95%) and what the research showed (50%), the good news is that intensive, systematic tutoring of at-risk students will raise some scores. Allington, however, noted an important factor in the success of that 50 percent, something Lyon left out of his testimony:

Moreover, Vellutino and colleagues removed from the pool of poor readers all students with measured IQs below 90. Approximately 30 percent of all students have measured IQs below 90, according to the bell curve distribution. In other words, this study demonstrated that intensive, expert tutoring could accelerate literacy development in half of the struggling readers with IQs of 90 or higher, resulting in average levels of reading proficiency in this group by the end of 2nd grade.

Despite the fact that significant numbers of those urban after-school children will have IQs below 90, the novice tutors employed by many commercial education companies are still being asked to achieve Vellutino's success rate with them.

The high cost of experience

Also according to Allington's studies, the Federal government isn't even close in its estimates of what it will cost this country to achieve its mandated tutoring goals. In the same Educational Leadership article, he offers this estimate:

In both studies, the students received 30–75 hours of expert tutoring; students in the Torgesen study received an additional 30 hours of tutoring from a paraprofessional. The expert tutors were typically certified teachers, including several with M.S. degrees and advanced certification in reading remediation. Such a teacher would cost a school approximately $50,000 annually (National Center for Education Statistics, 2003).
Tutors following the Vellutino model would work with 10 students each day. In our Normal Elementary School example, the program would require approximately 20 full-time tutors for a single semester or 10 full-time tutors for an entire year to teach the 200 students who qualified for tutoring. Tutors following the Torgesen model would work with four more students each day for an additional one and one-half years, which would mean hiring additional paraprofessionals. Either model would cost the school at least $500,000 annually (10 full-time teachers with a salary of $50,000 each).

Keep in mind that Allington's annual $500,000 figure is for just one average school, a place where there is a relatively small number of at-risk students. When Allington applied the price tag to an urban school where the majority of students are at-risk, the cost mushroomed to $1.7 million annually. Multiply both figures by the 93,000 public schools across America and you have a price tag that is close to reality but beyond Washington's worst nightmares. Complicating the picture is a fact unspoken by anyone with Reading First but stated in their approved research: The intensive tutoring only works with half the students, and low IQ students are factored out of the picture.

So by the norm, after-school tutoring will work half the time and only when the most experienced and expensive teachers are doing the teaching. Without that kind of expensive commitment, the hordes of after-school tutors now circling the schoolhouse will be little more than an exercise in money-grabbing by the private sector.

While public schools are wrestling with mixed results for profit-making after-school tutoring, suburbia is taking it to the other extreme, as The New York Times reports here in a May 23, 2004 dispatch from the suburbs:

ALLAN SCHNEIDER, a Westchester tutor, recently sat down with a 16-year-old high school junior from Chappaqua who had been sent to him for extra work in math for the SAT's. After a few weeks, he found that she solved almost every problem correctly.

"I told her 'you really don't need this,' and she said, 'No, my Mom loves tutoring and I have to have more,' " Mr. Schneider said. He called the girl's mother and told her the girl did not need his help. A few days later, Mr. Schneider got a phone call from a private college counselor who had a client looking for a math tutor for her daughter. The daughter turned out to be the same teenager he had just turned away.

Years ago, with a very few exceptions, tutoring was for students who were floundering or failing. Today it is a booming industry, fueled by parental angst over the college admissions process, that helps not only children who are struggling, but also gilds the lily, moving "B+" students to "A" students, giving extra support to students enrolled in honors and Advanced Placement courses and propelling children with high test scores into the very top percentiles.

To be sure, remedial tutoring is still a huge part of the market. But in Westchester, especially in what Mr. Schneider calls "the gold belt buckle of tutoring — Scarsdale, Greenwich and Chappaqua," other tutoring flourishes. There is academic subject tutoring, tutoring for standardized tests, including Regents exams, SAT II's (subject tests) and SAT's and also "support tutoring," which gives help with organizing a child's schedule, homework, papers and study habits ...

Last year tutoring was a $4 billion business nationally, according to Eduventures Inc., an education market research and consultant concern based in Boston. The company predicts that in 2004, the tutoring market will be $4.56 billion and in 2005, $5.2 billion.

— "Tutoring for the Already Brainy," by Kate Stone Lombardi
The New York Times, May 23, 2004

If that $5.2 billion figure sounds steep, compare it with what it would cost if the Allington standards were applied to America's 93,000 public school situations — assuming each school had an average number of students in need of remediation, that is, no urban needs). The annual national tutoring bill would be $46 billion, a little more than half the annual cost of the Iraq war. If you include the urban school population's needs, you'd be approaching the war costs. Since the entire Education Department budget (2005) is only $57.3 billion — from Head Start to college Pell Grants, from Special Education to Adult Education — the chance of such standards being adopted is nil.

When America approaches its education woes as a "war on ignorance" and spends accordingly, there'll be a good chance of winning. Right now we're doing it on the cheap while predicting victory is just around the corner.

FOOTNOTES:
1. "For Children Being Left Behind, Private Tutors Face Rocky Start," by Sam Dillon, The New York Times, April 16, 2004, p. 1.

2. "The Science of Reading Research," by G. Reid Lyon and Vinita Chhabra, Educational Leadership (ASCD), March, 2004, pp. 13-17.

3. "Teaching Reading IS Rocket Science," by Louisa C. Moats, American Educator (American Federation of Teachers) August, 1999. Moats' credentials as listed in the AFT article read: "This paper was prepared for the American Federation of Teachers by Louisa C. Moats, project director, Washington D.C. site of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) Early Interventions Project, and clinical associate professor of pediatrics, University of Texas, Houston, Health Sciences Center. Her work is supported in part by grant HD30995, 'Early Interventions for Children with Reading Problems,' funded by the NICHD."

4. "Reading Disability and the Brain," by Sally E. Shaywitz and Bennett A. Shaywitz, Educational Leadership, March, 2004, pp. 7-11.

5. "For Children Being Left Behind, Private Tutors Face Rocky Start."

6. Lyon, G. R. (1998, April 28). Overview of reading and literacy initiatives: Statement of G. Reid Lyon. Testimony before the Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources. Washington, DC. Available: http://156.40.88.3/publications/pubs/jeffords.htm

7. Torgesen, J. K., Wagner, R. K., & Rashotte, C. A. (1997)." Prevention and remediation of severe reading disabilities: Keeping the end in mind," Scientific Studies of Reading, 1(3), 217–234.

8. Vellutino, F. R., Sipay, E. R., Small, S. G., Pratt, A., Chen, R., & Denckla, M. B. (1996), "Cognitive profiles of difficult-to-remediate and readily remediated poor readers." Journal of Educational Psychology, 88(4), 601–638.

9. "Setting the Record Straight," by Richard L. Allington, Educational Leadership, March 2004, pp. 22-25.

INDEX for all NCLB, NRP, and Reading First essays and articles