Making Failure Pay: For-Profit Tutoring, High-Stakes Testing, and Public Schools
Jill P. Koyama
Abstract
A little-discussed aspect of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) is a mandate that requires failing schools to hire after-school tutoring companies—the largest of which are private, for-profit corporations—and to pay them with federal funds. This book takes a hard look at the implications of this new blurring of the boundaries between government, schools, and commerce in New York City, the country's largest school district. As it explains, NCLB—a federally legislated, state-regulated, district-administered, and school-applied policy—explicitly legitimizes giving private organizations significa ... More
A little-discussed aspect of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) is a mandate that requires failing schools to hire after-school tutoring companies—the largest of which are private, for-profit corporations—and to pay them with federal funds. This book takes a hard look at the implications of this new blurring of the boundaries between government, schools, and commerce in New York City, the country's largest school district. As it explains, NCLB—a federally legislated, state-regulated, district-administered, and school-applied policy—explicitly legitimizes giving private organizations significant roles in public education. Based on three years of ethnographic fieldwork, the book finds that the results are political, problematic, and highly profitable. Bringing to light these unproven, unregulated private companies' almost invisible partnership with the government, it lays bare the unintended consequences of federal efforts to eliminate school failure—not the least of which is more failure.
Keywords:
for-profit corporations,
NCLB,
after-school tutoring,
New York City,
school failure
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2010 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780226451732 |
| Published to Chicago Scholarship Online: February 2013 |
DOI:10.7208/chicago/9780226451756.001.0001 |
