The Tutoring Trend
What used to be “extra” has almost become the norm. But is it right for your child?
When my son Michael was eight, he came home from school and asked if he could have a tutor. "What for?" I wondered. His grades were good and his teacher had never indicated that he had any problems. Besides, he was only in third grade.
"Adam has one," he said, in the same matter-of-fact but insistent tone he used whenever he was campaigning for a puppy. "Lots of kids do. I want one, too."
When I was growing up, hiring a tutor was something a parent did if a child had fallen so far behind his classmates it was a struggle just to keep up. I was expecting to offer some type of tutoring when Michael was in high school cramming for the SATs. But in third grade?
Welcome to the new millennium.
Experts estimate that millions of youngsters, some as young as four, are being tutored — to stay on par with peers; to compensate for a learning disability; to boost their scores on high-stakes assessment tests required for promotion or acceptance into gifted/talented programs; or simply to grab that competitive edge. And not surprisingly, in this, as in just about every parenting issue, experts are at odds over whether all this extra work is such a good idea.
A Brave New World
In the last decade, as education has zoomed to the top of the national agenda and demand for higher standards and more accountability on the part of schools has increased, tutoring little kids has become big business. Many parents are opting to supplement their children's education with outside assistance, whether in the form of private help with a moonlighting or retired teacher, college student or recent grad, or small classes at one of the national chains. The largest, Sylvan Reading Systems, has 950 centers in the US and Canada; other big players include Huntington Learning Centers and Kumon Math & Reading Centers.
What's more, test-preparation giants such as The Princeton Review and Kaplan (with 150 centers in 11 states), long aimed at college-bound high school students, report a surge in demand for their services at the elementary school level. Both companies now run publicly funded tutoring programs in city schools as well as online programs, complete with access to 24-hour-a-day tutors, for children as young as kindergarten. Under the No Child Left Behind Act, passed by Congress in 2002, about $1 billion of Federal funds has been set aside to pay for free tutorial help for low-income children who attend failing schools (for more details, see the U.S. Department of Education web site). So far, few parents nationwide have taken advantage of this program — mostly, educators believe, because the schools have failed to inform them of their rights or make the programs readily available. If your school has not notified you about your options, contact your state education department.
That Competitive Edge
Perhaps it's not surprising that, in an age when the college admissions frenzy causes angst even in families still buying diapers, some parents of kids who are doing just fine feel compelled to seek help so that they can do even better. As my son's experience shows, in some cases, having a tutor has become the latest status symbol.
"There is nothing wrong with tutoring in principle," says Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Ph.D., co-author of Einstein Never Used Flashcards: How Our Children Really Learn and Why They Need to Play More and Memorize Less and a professor at Temple University in Philadelphia. "But what I'm hearing today is that children are being coached to get into the right preschool. This generation of parents believes it's never too early to start academic learning — and that you must grab every opportunity. But childhood is not a race; it's a journey. And faster isn't always better."
She's not the only expert to voice chagrin at the push-to-excel mentality that is partly fueling the tutoring boom. "Parents have to walk a fine line between helping a child and pushing too hard," notes child psychiatrist Alvin Rosenfeld, M.D., coauthor of The Overscheduled Child: Avoiding the Hyper-Parenting Trap. "Kids don't have to be excellent in everything. If you push a child in an academic area before she's developmentally ready, it will take twice as long for her to learn the material than it would if you waited for the appropriate time." (See Time for a Tutor?)
Moreover, by calling in the tutoring troops too soon, or when a child is doing just fine, you run the risk of undermining her self-confidence and perseverance. "In the same way that aspirin is appropriate when you have a headache, taking gobs of aspirin when you don't have a headache is not going to make you feel better," says Hirsh-Pasek. "If your child has a learning disability, yes, he needs extra help. If there is something that is holding him back, yes. But children learn more about mathematics in kindergarten by baking for the class and figuring out how much batter they need to fill up the muffin tins than they do from being drilled in multiplication tables."
And while academics are unquestionably important, so, too, is time for sports, music, and playing with friends, not to mention time to do absolutely nothing. "Children need a balance in their lives," says Hirsh-Pasek. "Making every moment count is exactly the wrong way to go. It's in the down time that our children learn the physics of rolling balls, the biology of worms that dig holes, the mathematics in the muffin pans. If we don't schedule down time, our children will suffer."
When Tutoring Can Help
On the other hand, tutoring for the right reasons can spell the difference between a child who flounders and one who flourishes. "While the major work of learning takes place in school, a qualified tutor — working in tandem with the teacher — can perform a valuable function in helping to reinforce a child's reading and writing skills and apply them to homework assignments, as well as introduce study and organization skills," says Sally Shaywitz, M.D., co-director of the Yale Center for the Study of Learning and Attention and author of Overcoming Dyslexia.
In fact, for many kids it's not only appropriate, but necessary to have a tutor. "When specific, basic skills are not developing as you would expect, or when a child has a diagnosed learning disability, having a tutor can help her build those special skills or compensate for the ones she lacks," says learning specialist Susan J. Schwartz, M.A. Ed., clinical coordinator at the Institute for Learning and Academic Achievement at the New York University Child Study Center.
For time-crunched parents, themselves baffled by their kid's homework, or those whose child has a learning disability, a qualified tutor can personalize lessons to accommodate learning style, boost self-esteem — and end the nightly battles over homework. It's a boon, as well, for children lost in the shuffle of the large class sizes all too common in today's public schools.
"It's hard to teach your own child," says David Kahn, M.S., a former teacher in New York City who has been tutoring middle and high school students in math and English for 15 years. "A kid will listen to a tutor when he won't listen to a parent, or maybe even a teacher. A tutor can be an impartial referee — someone to motivate and guide, without judgment and without any emotional baggage." Since every child learns in a different way, at a different pace, one teacher with a class of 30-plus youngsters can't possibly accommodate all learning styles all the time or answer all the questions.
Tutors can also be an important resource for parents who believe current school curricula are ineffective when it comes to teaching the basics of reading and math, not to mention study and organizational skills. Even gifted students can benefit from the focused attention of a tutor to challenge their minds and keep them excited about learning.
