The excellent Schools Matter blog brings to our attention a Policy Brief on the Supplemental Educational Services program of the NCLB. The brief is published by The Civil Rights Project at UCLA, and concludes with these recomendations:

Five years after NCLB mandated the SES program, there is very little evidence documenting its effectiveness. Even so, the program continues to receive substantial funding. Until there is better evidence of the effectiveness of these programs, SES should not be required and there should not be a mandated federal set-aside to fund the program. We recommend that the set-aside currently mandated for SES be used to support state school improvement efforts and the implementation of a school’s improvement plan. In this way, schools can be encouraged to adopt evidence based school improvement strategies that can be carefully designed to meet identified educational needs.

If Congress decides, as it debates reauthorization of NCLB, to continue the SES program, we suggest requiring a federally mandated evaluation of the entire program that examines the quality of these programs, documents the instructional benefits of the various providers, and identifies the effectiveness of SES for improving student learning and other noncognitive indicators, such as attendance, graduation rates, and progression through school. Under the current policy, states are primarily responsible for evaluating the quality and effectiveness of SES, but they have not been provided the resources to so. It is unclear that, even with additional resources, states have the capacity to conduct rigorous evaluations and monitor the performance of SES providers. Clearly, providing rigorous research on SES is an appropriate role for the federal government.

Finally, we recommend that SES instructors be subject to the highly qualified teacher provisions that NCLB requires of all other public school teachers and that federal antidiscrimination laws apply to SES providers by specifically identifying them as recipients of federal funding.