Tutoring Business Booms in Wake of NCLB

[Bob Schaeffer <bobschaeffer@earthlink.net>]

                  BIG MARKET FOR TUTORING
          Christian Science Monitor-- May 13, 2003
                by G. Jeffrey MacDonald

NASHUA, N.H. - Ranjana Sundaram was doing fine in kindergarten when her 
mother starting bringing her to a retail space in downtown Nashua twice 
a week for extra work in reading and math.

"In kindergarten they don't do much, but in first grade, there's a huge 
expectation of the child," says her mother, Dr. Sudha Parasuraman. "I 
know for sure she would have had a hard time coping with it if she 
didn't have her basics down."

Across a narrow, bare-bones waiting room at this Kumon Math & Reading 
Center, mothers of Indian, Chinese, and Anglo backgrounds sit in 
metal-backed chairs, waiting as their children complete assignments 
designed especially for them. Between calls on their cellular phones, 
each mother offers a distinct reason for being there.

One child is falling behind in sixth-grade reading. Another is striving 
to stay No. 1 in math in his second grade class. Whatever the problem or 
whatever the goal, the answer for these moms seems to be individualized 
education - even sometimes before their children have moved beyond nap 
times.

Business is booming at private, for-profit learning centers, especially 
in urban and suburban areas, where parents regularly spend thousands per 
year for a tailor-made, supplemental-learning program. Numbers tell the 
story:

• Sylvan Learning Centers has added more than 500 centers in the past 10 
years, growing from 449 in 1993 to 960 this year.

• Princeton Review, known for standardized test preparation classes, 
attracted fewer than 39,000 students to its company-owned sites in 2000. 
By 2002, more than 81,000 had come for extra help. Over the same period, 
revenues for the test-preparation division soared from $34 million to 
$66 million.

• Kumon Math & Reading Centers helped 33,000 students in the United 
States to master their basics in 1992. This year, that figure exceeds 
120,000.

• The number of individuals nationwide offering private tutoring for a 
fee has increased from 250,000 five years ago to more than 1 million 
today, according to the National Tutoring Association in Indianapolis.

Pressure from parents and increasingly competitive colleges may explain 
why demand for test-score-boosting services continues to grow, even in a 
sluggish economy. But both buyers and sellers in this blossoming 
marketplace cite an additional, less noticed reason: Customized training 
seems to achieve results in an age when parents, teachers, and students 
have less and less time to do it themselves.

Consider, for instance, how services have changed at the Princeton 
Review. Private tutoring, which made up just 5 percent of the business 
in 1998, now accounts for 10 percent. One primary reason, according to 
executive director Jed Smith of the company's 1-2-1 Private Tutoring 
division in New York, was rising dissatisfaction with a classroom 
approach in which the group's needs seemed to come before the individual's.

The classroom prep class was "no longer the cool, neat, elite thing," 
Mr. Smith says. Students began saying, 'I don't want to sit in a class 
with 10 other kids. I want them to come to my home and work with me on a 
one-to-one basis.' "

Today, Smith oversees between 150 and 200 New York tutors - up from 30 
in 1998 - who are available "24-7-365." If someone wants to be tutored 
in history at 6 a.m. on Tuesdays, Smith says, a tutor will be there. For 
such specialized service, parents pay between $125 and $325 per hour. 
But those tutors whose clients get consistent results in the form of 
rising scores and better grades in challenging subjects are constantly 
in demand, he says, from "overbooked" parents and students.

New York isn't the only place where families seek an extra edge in 
customized training. The company now sends summer tutors to Nantucket in 
Massachusetts, the Hamptons, and vacation spots along the Eastern 
seaboard, as well as smaller cities such as Burlington, Vt., and 
Portland, Maine. Even where families don't have extra money for 
tutoring, creative alternatives are sprouting up with the same goal in 
mind: education tailored to each student's needs and learning style.

Example: Free tutoring from peers in junior high and high school marks 
the hottest area of the "tutoring explosion," says Thomas Redicks, 
president of the National Tutoring Association. Such arrangements aren't 
ideal because peer tutors are seldom trained, he says, but students 
still benefit from such coaching.

"Tutors work with the intent of helping students become better 
learners," Mr. Redicks says. Even when tutoring comes from fellow 
students, he says, "it can provide a lot of assistance to a lot of kids."

Customizing education is hardly new. Its roots run at least as far back 
as the Greek philosopher Socrates, who let each student's answers 
influence the direction of the next question. Yet interest in the 
endeavor has grown recently as concerns for efficiency and test results 
have taken center stage in public schools.

In New Hampshire, for example, third-graders must perform well on 
statewide tests in order for a school to maximize funding under current 
formulas. This leads schools to introduce complex tasks as early as 
first grade and to push students along before they have mastered the 
basics, according to Shashank Dubey, who with his wife, Archana, owns 
the Nashua Kumon franchise.

"The emphasis on basic skills in schools is not enough," Mr. Dubey 
explains, as a kindergartner and a sixth-grader take quizzes 
side-by-side at a table. "We're jumping to application and 
problem-solving too quickly." Concerned parents pay $85 per month for 
either a reading or mathematics curriculum that involves diagnostic 
testing, biweekly quizzes, and daily assignments for the student to 
complete independently.

Parents, however, aren't the only ones seeking out the services of 
private learning centers to fill what they perceive to be gaps. Title I 
school districts, where income levels are low, may use a portion of 
their federal funding to help children get extra help when a troubled 
district's test scores fail to rise over two consecutive years. As a 
result, in April, public schools in Chicago and Los Angeles began 
sending students to private learning centers for extra help.

Public school contracts promise a further boon for the private learning 
industry. Kumon expects that factor alone to account for 10 percent 
increase in business over the next three years.

"Eventually, it's making available [in inner cities] tutoring that was 
formerly available only in the suburbs," says Matthew Lupsha, vice 
president of education services for Kumon. "There are a lot of demands 
on teachers. They don't have the time to address the needs of every 
student within their care.... But, ultimately, this combination will 
raise test scores and improve satisfaction with the public school systems."

"Schools are being expected to play a bigger role" in accomplishing test 
results, says Wendy Odell Magus, spokeswoman for Sylvan Learning 
Centers. "We have higher and higher expectations of what students should 
achieve and what schools should do to prepare them." Yet because parents 
bring a wider range of expectations than any school could meet, she 
says, the private learning industry will continue to have a niche to fill.

Even as schools strive to meet mounting expectations, private learning 
programs tout an efficiency that schools may never match. That's largely 
what parents of private and parochial students pay for when they shell 
out $325 per hour for Jonathan Arak's skills as a "premier tutor" in 
Manhattan.

"I get an opportunity to spot something that's a more glaring weakness 
and work on it," Mr. Arak says. He sees "more anxiety, more competition, 
and a more intense environment" than when he started tutoring 14 years 
ago. To ease the stress without further stretching a student's busy 
schedule is apparently worth the money to his 15 clients, who keep him 
busy as many as 22 hours per week.

Back in Nashua, students work for 20 or 30 minutes at a time as their 
mothers chat quietly nearby. As they turn in the quizzes that monitor 
progress, some admire their own names posted on a board for those who 
score 100. When they get a good report card, Dubey says, "It makes my 
day." And what's more, it justifies for him the energy and expense 
required for individualized learning.

"If I start tutoring, I put my way of learning on top of them," Dubey 
says. "We help students learn their own way of learning. That's really 
what it's all about."

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