A minority of students in persistently failing Title I schools are getting the free tutoring services they might be entitled to under federal law, according to an analysis from the National Center for Education Statistics.
Under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, schools that receive funding from the federal Title I program for disadvantaged students are required to offer supplemental education services if they fail to meet their achievement targets for three or more years. But the report estimates that, by the 2006-07 school year, only 22 percent of students in the schools targeted by the law were taking advantage of the extra assistance. That compares with 13 percent of students in a comparison group of public schools. Under the law, states can require all chronically failing schools to offer tutoring, which is why some of the non-Title I schools in the sample offered that service.
Sixty percent of the parents of children in the persistently failing schools said they had received information from schools about tutoring, which suggests that many schools were getting the message out about supplemental academic help.
Released last month, the report is based on data from a nationally representative survey of households with children.
