Missing the Tutor Connection, guest message from Rey Carr, Ph.D.

From Rey Carr, Ph.D. hosts a comprehensive peer mentoring and coaching resource at http://www.peer.ca/peer.html.

Below is the Letter to Editor that Rey sent to the Chicago Tribune following a story and editorial about the No Child Left Behind tutoring in Chicago. Rey sent this to the T/MC with the note, "They didn't contact me to verify, so I suppose it did not get accepted." I offered to post the letter here, as I do with many of my own letters that do not get printed in the Chicago papers.

Thanks Ray, for sharing this.

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While is was disappointing to learn about the meager results of the
Chicago Public Schools tutoring efforts ("Has tutoring worked?"
August 12, 2005), it was also predictable. The No Child Left Behind
law is wreaking havoc for students across the Nation. It clearly
fails to address root causes of low or poor academic achievement and
gives for-profit businesses an opportunity to skim money from
taxpayers.

Poverty is the primary cause for poor school achievement. And I mean
both financial and relationship poverty. The Chicago Public Schools
study of tutoring might have shown different results had they
compared their No Child Left Behind Act tutoring ventures with the
non-profit, community-based, city-wide tutoring relationship services
facilitated by the Tutor/Mentor Connection. This organization
recognizes that building a relationship with a young person is
essential to the success of tutoring. By combining academic
assignments with social and interpersonal support, this kind of
tutoring has much greater success.

By agreeing with the Federal government to restrict teacher
involvement in tutoring, the Chicago Public Schools is cutting out
those individuals who recognize the importance of
relationship-building as an antidote to the power of poverty to limit
academic achievement. In addition, the schools need to build and
strengthen student-to-student peer tutoring as a way to add further
support for achievement. Without attending to relationship poverty,
the tutoring services of the CPS will continue to show dismal results.

Rey Carr, Ph.D.
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Tel: (250) 595-3503
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