Spellings to Catholic Schools: Expand Tutoring

U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings called on the nation's Roman Catholic schools to become active in providing tutoring to public school students under the federal No Child Left Behind Act. Under the law, public schools that fail to meet improvement goals for two consecutive years must provide transportation for students to transfer to another public school if they wish. After a third year of failing to make adequate yearly progress, districts must offer the opportunity for free after-school tutoring. Federal funding pays for the tutoring, which is being performed by a wide variety of state-approved organizations, including private tutoring companies and some religiously based groups. In this article, the author states that two Catholic school systems, run by the Diocese of Memphis and the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, were approved to provide tutoring at the start of this school year, 2005. However, neither currently is tutoring any students.