ABSTRACT
Th e tutoring industry has been transformed since the late 1990s. Multinational corporations see there is much money to be made in tutoring students aft er school, and are competing for business.1 In the United States, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) has helped drive these transformations through mandates that I identifi ed in earlier chapters. Specifi cally, districts with schools that have not made test score targets under NCLB must set aside a percentage of their Title I funds for aft er-school programming also known as supplemental education services (SES).2 Parents of eligible children select an SES vendor from a list approved by the state. SES providers may include for-profi t fi rms, nonprofi t fi rms, and school districts. Th e district pays the fi rms directly from Title I funds. As the number of schools failing to make test score targets increases, so does the level of funding allocated for this purpose. Th e funds set aside for SES increased from $1.75 billion in fi scal year 2001 to approximately $2.55 billion in FY 2005.3
A small but growing body of literature has examined these developments and off ered policymakers a useful framework for thinking about the implementation challenges of SES and its eff ects on student achievement.4 However, so far this work has examined the dynamics and eff ects of SES independently from its market based origins: neoliberalism. Th is chapter begins to address the silence in the discourse by examining SES as an instance of the broader trend toward market-based education services, described in chapter 1.
