A federally mandated after-school tutoring program for poor students from failing schools spends millions annually in Baltimore but has woefully inadequate management and oversight, according to a study released Tuesday by the Abell Foundation.

Students – in one account, as young as 5-years-old – are initialing their own tutoring timesheets in the program, Supplemental Education Services (SES), according to the report. A growing pack of for-profit and non-profit vendors, whose pressure tactics reminded one former city schools employee of “used car salesmen,” compete for the lucrative business of tutoring SES students.

“Often, eligible children do not begin actual tutoring sessions until January, halfway through the school year,” as a result of the flurry of recruiting and the daunting paperwork,  according to the report, “Sending Out an SOS for SES,” authored by longtime Baltimore journalist Joan Jacobson.

The reason for the feeding frenzy? Abundant revenue, with few checks and balances, the report suggests. The city spent $55 million over the last nine years on SES tutoring. Over the last school year alone (2010-11) City Schools was required to allocate $12 million for SES tutoring to serve 5,769 students in 41 schools.

And yet the Maryland State Department of Education, which monitors the program and allows tutoring companies to “self-evaluate,’ “has no credible evidence that SES is making a difference,” the Abell report concludes.

“This is a classic case of outsourcing a vital education program to private contractors without adequate public monitoring and regulation,” Jacobson told The Brew today. “Therefore, no one knows if tutored students are making academic improvement, even though the federal law states improving academic achievement as the program’s purpose.”

City schools spokeswoman Edie House-Foster, contacted Tuesday about the report, said today she could not provide a response because administrators are “at a retreat.”

Recruiting with T-shirts and Frisbees

There’s clearly more at stake than money with SES, which was established in 2002 by the federal No Child Left Behind Act. Created to help students with math and reading scores that are among the lowest in the nation, SES is hugely popular in Baltimore and has a waiting list among elementary and middle school students. Because of limited funds, only 8,228 of 18,871 eligible students received tutoring in 2009-10, the report says.

And yet even as the city’s annual SES funding has increased significantly (from $500,000 in 2002-03 to $12 million in 2010-11), the program has been serving fewer students in recent years.

The number of city tutoring companies approved by the state has mushroomed from two to 29 in nine years, as they compete for students who bring with them $2,554-per-student SES allotments. Larger companies the study examined stood to gross $1 million per year if all the students who signed up completed all their sessions.

Competition for students can be furious. “One provider reported seeing other tutoring companies offer incentives of tee-shirts, Frisbees and candy at school fairs where parents sign up for SES,” the report said.

And yet, the program provides no federal funding for evaluating the effectiveness of vendors’ tutoring or comparing actual attendance of tutors with timesheets and invoices, one of several major flaws Jacobson found in the legislation.

“The payment system for these private providers is also questionable,” Jacobson told The Brew. “City school officials can’t say for certain if all the money they pay contractors for invoices they submit is indeed for hours they actually spent tutoring.”

Jacobson, a former Baltimore Sun reporter who has also written for The Brew, should know. As a parent, she uncovered what turned out to be criminal fraud involving a separate city tutoring program that uses a similar system for attendance record-keeping. Tracy Queen, owner of Queens Mobile Education, pleaded guilty in April to charges of submitting false invoices with forged parents’ signatures that billed the school system over three years for 3,966 hours of tutoring for 250 students for tutoring that never occurred. (Queen, who was sentenced to 10 years in prison in connection with the scheme, was not charged with stealing from the SES program.)

As for whether the SES tutoring actually helps students, that’s hard to say as well, as far as Jacobson found, after her six-month study. The state has never removed a provider based on poor student outcomes, as they are required by the federal law to do if they ever find one, the report notes.

The rules allow city school teachers to be hired as SES tutors and recruiters, raising ethical questions about giving providers who hire them an unfair recruiting advantage, Jacobson observes. Also, “some question the rationale for hiring a teacher from an under-performing school t continue working with those same students after school,” Jacobson notes.

Abell recommends drastic reforms to tighten a federal law that hamstrings city school officials. Their report quotes Tasha Franklin-Johnson, director of federal programs for city schools, saying she is frustrated with lack of local control over providers and “perplexed” about whether the tutoring improves academic achievement.

The report notes that federal law does allow an entire school system to apply to the state to become a provider and “Baltimore school officials are considering just that as a way to have more control.”

Meanhwile, though, city school officials should make some other changes, the report argues. Among the recommendations: overhaul the financial accountability system, give parents a report card for each provider including rates and data on academic outcomes from the state and streamline its system so tutoring can begin earlier in the year.