EDITORIAL- No child left behind, except all of them

Boy, kids in Pittsburgh sure are smart. They’re so smart that when the federal government… Boy, kids in Pittsburgh sure are smart. They’re so smart that when the federal government offered to pay up to $2.5 million to help them with “supplemental education services” — that’s government-speak for “tutoring” — not one of the 2,900 qualified Pittsburgh public school students took them up on it.

Or, perhaps, it’s because the kids and their parents didn’t know about the service. As part of the No Child Left Behind Act, Pittsburgh students qualify for this program if they: a) attend a school that has consistently fallen short on meeting government standards and b) qualify for the reduced-price or free lunch program.

As for the other children who go to marginally better schools or whose parents make a bit too much money — well, they get left behind.

And, right now, according to the Associated Press and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, all the kids are being left behind.

Pittsburgh public schools already have an in-house tutoring program. The federally funded tutoring programs would be supplemental to those programs and would require parents to find a tutor, coordinate their children’s tutoring through the school district, which would then coordinate it with the tutoring company and get funding from the federal government. With all the coordinating, it’s no wonder parents haven’t signed up.

Subcontracting is, of course, the American way. Now that the government is taking the Halliburton approach to education, it’s time to remember who the original educational subcontractors are — the public schools.

It’s puzzling why this money hasn’t been diverted into the school system. A tutoring fact sheet provided by Pittsburgh Council on Public Education cites that the schools, among other qualified organizations, can receive this funding, but a Post-Gazette article says the schools can’t provide federally funded tutoring until they meet certain requirements in educating disadvantaged, black and special needs students — so the schools can and will tutor students, they just can’t receive funding for it.

It’s no mystery why parents might want the schools to tutor their students. Teachers would already be familiar with the material; parents who work wouldn’t have to worry about ferrying their kids to and from tutoring, whether via Port Authority’s slashed-and-burned bus services or across Pittsburgh’s rush-hour traffic.

The solution seems easy: Forget the requirements and the standardizations; there are few problems in education that can’t be solved by throwing money at them. If students don’t go to private tutoring businesses for their supplemental education, give money to failing schools, so that they can beef up their programs or, perhaps, hire more teachers, to try to combat the problems that got them blacklisted in the first place.