Originally Posted by La Texican
I wonder why a tiger-mom can send their kid to one hour of Sylvan tutoring a day and they get ahead, yet half of the town here sends their kid to school tutoring an hour after school every day and they can barely keep up? Is it because the tiger moms tutor their brightest kids and oour school only tutors the struggling students?

Not a direct answer to your question, but here is a new article finding that the effectiveness of math tutoring may depend on the biology of the child. The article phrased things more strongly than even I would:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/04/29/us-science-brain-math-idUSBRE93S0XI20130429

Your child's brain on math: Don't bother?
By Sharon Begley
NEW YORK | Mon Apr 29, 2013 5:02pm EDT
(Reuters) - Parents whose children are struggling with math often view intense tutoring as the best way to help them master crucial skills, but a new study released on Monday suggests that for some kids even that is a lost cause.

According to the research, the size of one key brain structure and the connections between it and other regions can help identify the 8- and 9-year olds who will hardly benefit from one-on-one math instruction.

"We could predict how much a child learned from the tutoring based on measures of brain structure and connectivity," said Vinod Menon, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine, who led the research.

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I think the paper is

http://stanford.edu/group/scsnl/cgi-bin/drupal_scsnl/content/publications
Supekar, K., Swigart, A., Tenison, C., Jolles, D., Rosenberg-Lee, M., Fuchs, L., & Menon, V. (2013). Neural predictors of individual differences in response to math tutoring in primary-grade school children. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. (In press)