There's a quiet revolution happening at the US Department of Education concerning the department's rules governing tutoring services funded by the federal government under No Child Left Behind. Ok, maybe revolution is too strong of a word, but the conflict taking place is real and it underscores a serious area in which reform could truly benefit students.

The debate is about NCLB's requirement that schools provide free tutoring services (called "Supplemental Educational Services" or "SES" by the law) to low-income children in low-performing schools that fail to meet state targets for annual yearly progress for three consecutive years. In basic terms, the law functions this way: if a child attends a school that is measured as failing by virtue of its low standardized test scores three years in a row, that school is required by law to offer the child access to free tutoring before or after school, paid for by the federal government. But the fed doesn't pay for the tutoring with new dollars, it instead requires that the school use the federal dollars that it is already receiving under Title I to pay for the tutoring --as much as $1,800 per student, depending on where the child lives.

The controversy that has arisen in recent days started with an April 1st, but not April-Fools letter from new Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, which stated that he would be changing the rules as they had been applied in the previous administration. Under the Bush Administration and former Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, school districts were required to pay a third party to provide the tutoring service--usually a for-profit or non-profit company with some pre-designed tutoring program. The law thus functioned as a windfall for existing tutoring companies and a spark for the creation of many new companies, but the results were hardly encouraging, as there were wide gaps in the effectiveness of the program and many of them showed little benefit altogether.

Part of the reason why all of the money spent on the tutoring--more than $2.5 billion in 2005--yielded such little in the way of results was that very few students actually participated. The NY Times observed in 2004, for instance, that of the 2 million students eligible for the tutoring services, only 12% were actually receiving them. Secretary Duncan, based on his experience from Chicago, has argued that one of the reasons why the program has had such little effect and enrolled so few students is because of the old rule requiring schools to outsource the tutoring to private companies rather than provide the tutoring themselves. So it was of little surprise that Mr. Duncan's letter to school officials on April 1st indicated that he would be changing the rules to allow schools to provide the tutoring services directly.

What will be the result of that change? If you listen to the nation's leading education thinkers, probably not much. The reality is, as long as these services are dubbed "supplemental" and described as "tutoring" they won't have the kind of buy-in from parents, students, or educators (whether from the school district or an outside company) that is necessary to foster a learning environment. The data tell us that there is little reason to think that a wholly voluntary program provided by a low-performing school to its children will do in an hour after class what it has struggled to do for years; and just as little reason to think that some for-profit (or even non-profit) company will be able to swoop in and do it either.

So here's a better idea: what if we require schools that are chronically failing to use their federal dollars to extend the formal length of the school year and school day? Instead of sending a letter home to parents to tell them that their child is eligible for free tutoring if the parent is able to bring the child to school early every morning or pick them up after school hours (which poses two problems: first, parents often are reluctant to affirmatively enroll their kids in a tutoring program that is seen as remedial, and second, the pick up and drop off are themselves logistically challenging), let's just require all of the children to spend more time on the vital learning tasks that schools should be doing to begin with. Now it's no solution by itself, since a lengthened school day and year is only as effective as the teachers in each classroom, but it would guarantee a much higher rate of participation than the 12% we're seeing with the current "tutoring" services. And it would potentially give teachers the kind of additional time they need with individual students to make the kinds of connections that foster learning.