BALTIMORE - A wall will eventually sag or crumble if too many blocks are missing. The same thing can happen to a child’s education when he or she lacks too many skills. Because so many taxpayer-funded schools are not providing adequate instruction to children, parents must look elsewhere to help fill the gaps.

This situation drives growth in the supplemental education market every year. The demand stems both from federal requirements and parents. No Child Left Behind requires that Title I schools not meeting Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) provide tutoring to needy students.

In spite of the NCLB mandate, many more children need supplemental education than receive it. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) said states and school districts need to vastly improve how they advertise tutoring information to parents in an August 2006 report. Contracting and services mismanagement, for example, led to only 19 percent of eligible students in the 2004-2005 school year receiving extra help. In 2007, 2.3 million students were eligible for services. Many issues can contribute to students not using services, including living in rural or dangerous areas without many tutor choices, a lack of information about them and language barriers.

Outside of school districts, many parents seek a private tutoring provider, paying directly out of pocket or by way of a supplemental student loan. Sallie Mae, for example, designs a loan specifically for tutoring. Providers that align instruction with state and local curricula also test students to determine areas of need before instruction starts. Various public agencies specializing in social services and child welfare and non-profit organizations including the Salvation Army also offer funding for K-12 tutoring outside the confines of the school day. Paying more for education may seem ridiculous, but college savings are useless without a solid elementary and secondary education.

The bottom line is that supplemental education serves a dual purpose: To fill in the gaps left by schools and to allow parents to exercise choice with their child’s education. Many parents stretch their budgets to pay for these services and already pay for public schools via taxes. Were all schools doing their job the market would not be so prevalent.

Individualized instruction works because it targets students’ own learning styles, areas of difficulty and skills missed along the way. Instruction can hardly be individualized in a classroom of 20-30 children of varying levels and strengths. The existing cookie-cutter push through the system discourages retention and definitely does not increase confidence. Instead, children lacking basic skills in fractions and decimals are pushed into algebra before they are ready and students reading on a 6th grade level enter high school. Pressure to succeed on standardized tests and get ahead in school is not matched by the tools to do so.

In essence, parents who seek these services exercise a form of school choice. Rather than accept status quo at their child’s residential school, they seek help outside of the school system.

Parents can and should reach out to all possible venues for tutoring assistance — the school district, county and city government, private companies, non-profit and community organizations, and even the classifieds. States such as Maryland can take greater strides in publicizing the availability of tutoring and after-school services in Title I schools. The onus to educate does not rest only with schools, but parents can rightly ask why their children continue to struggle while they move to the next grade. Even with the pressures of NCLB, too many kids move through school without basic and advanced math and reading skills. Until then, the supplemental education market will continue to grow.

Alison Lake is a former teacher, managing editor at the Maryland Public Policy Institute and center director of a supplemental education provider. She can be reached at alisonlake@comcast.net.

Examiner