It seemed like a reasonable thing to do at the time. As part of the 2002 No Child Left Behind federal education law, schools were required to offer tutoring services to kids from low-performing schools.
But during the past decade, millions of federal dollars were wasted on academic coaching that didn't work. In Minnesota, the state's 10 largest districts spent nearly $30 million for tutors since 2007, but they have precious little student improvement to show for it. About 5,000 Minnesota kids, mostly from the Twin Cities area, had tutors through the program last year.
There is more than enough blame to go around for this colossal abuse of federal money. In the initial legislation, the feds required that districts set aside up to 20 percent of their Title I federal funds for tutoring. Title I dollars support programs for low-income students. But in that founding legislation, Congress failed to build in oversight provisions.
At the state level, the Department of Education reviewed applications from vendors, then vetted them for the state's stamp of approval. Parents could then select from the state list. But too many of those "approved" vendors didn't help kids progress academically. Minnesota was among 30 states that did nothing to rank or grade the providers and offered no data on tutor performance.
That failure was well-documented in a recent a three-part Star Tribune series. Reporters Jeffrey Meitrodt and Daarel Burnette described how many companies in the federal Supplemental Educational Services (SES) tutoring program charged for missed appointments and had long service delays. In the Twin Cities, thousands of students quit the programs without completing any lessons, and many struggled to communicate online with tutors from foreign countries.
The reporters found that at least 21 tutoring services that operated in Minnesota were caught seeking payment without providing documentation of work performed.
Local school district officials say their hands were tied and that they had to cut checks to even the worst providers. Under the law, parents chose tutoring services without any help or recommendations from their local districts. Some district officials knew the tutoring was ineffective and cut off contracts with bad actors. But others could have done more to keep dollars from flowing into the hands of questionable providers.
And the state Department of Education certainly could have done more to follow up over 10 years. Other states did a better job of assessing services and giving families more direction.