Critics Question Use of Offshore Firms for Online Tutoring

Concern is rising in some quarters that the No Child Left Behind Act permits foreign companies to provide federally financed online tutoring to students at underperforming schools.

Such arrangements appear to constitute only a minute fraction of the tutoring business that is mushrooming under the federal law. But nine members of Congress last week asked the Government Accountability Office to examine the practice, along with a host of other implementation issues raised by the law’s provisions for supplemental educational services.

The law requires school districts to use part of their federal Title I aid for disadvantaged children to pay for tutoring for low-income students whose schools fail to make sufficient academic progress three years in a row. Companies that obtain state approval may then contract with individual districts to offer tutoring. Some of those companies provide services, especially in...