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Tutor Program Offered by Law Is Going Unused

Four years after President Bush signed the landmark No Child Left Behind education law, vast numbers of students are not getting the tutoring that the law offers as one of its hallmarks.

In the nation’s largest school district, New York City, less than half of the 215,000 eligible students sought the free tutoring, figures for the last school year that ended in June 2005 from the city’s Department of Education show.

In one area of the city, District 19 in eastern Brooklyn, for instance, about 3,700 students completed a tutoring program last year, even though more than 13,000 students qualified.

Yet New York’s participation rate is better than the national average: across the country roughly two million public school students were eligible for free tutoring in the school year that ended in 2004, according to the most recent data available from the Department of Education, yet only 226,000 — or nearly 12 percent — received help.

In California in the last school year, 95,500 of 800,000 eligible students were tutored. In Maryland, just over a quarter of those who were eligible — 5,580 of 19,520 students — actually enrolled in the last school year. And in Louisiana, despite aggressive marketing by the state, only about 5,000 of 50,000 eligible students took part in the program last year.

The No Child Left Behind law requires consistently failing schools that serve mostly poor children to offer their students a choice if they want it: a new school or else tutoring from private companies or other groups, paid for with federal money — typically more than $1,800 a child in big cities. In the past the schools would have been under no obligation to use that Title I federal poverty grant to pay for outside tutoring.

By SUSAN SAULNY

Full Story: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/12/education/12tutor.html?hp&ex=1139720400&en=7acb50ec013ae6b2&ei=5094&partner=homepage

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