Supplemental Debate!

USA Today’s ed board and Secretary of Education Spellings debate No Child Left Behind’s supplemental services (extra tutoring) provisions. They are both sort of right. The ed board is right that quality and oversight in the program is completely haphazard. The Secretary is right that school districts are dragging their feet. But, solving the Secretary’s beef doesn’t solve the ed board’s, and might in fact make it worse. I was surprised that the administration didn’t put more quality components into their NCLB reauthorization proposal to get on top of this. The Aspens have some ideas but the real juice would come from the good providers adopting some quality criteria to police the lousy ones — which is in their self-interest, too.