Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion NYC tutoring of private school students

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/08/education/08tutors.html
Push for A�s at Private Schools Is Keeping Costly Tutors Busy
By JENNY ANDERSON
June 7, 2011
New York Times

...

Private SAT tutors have been de rigueur at elite New York private schools for a generation, but the proliferation of subject-matter tutors for students angling for A�s is a newer phenomenon that is beginning to incite a backlash. Interviews with parents, students, teachers, administrators, tutors and consultants suggest that more than half of the students at the city�s top-tier schools hire tutors, an open secret that the schools seem unable to stop.

�There�s no family that gets through private school without an SAT tutor,� said Sandy Bass, the mother of two former Riverdale students and the founder of the newsletter Private School Insider. �Increasingly, it�s impossible to get through private school without at least one subject tutor.�

A decade ago, Advantage Testing, perhaps the city�s premier tutoring company, was essentially an SAT-prep factory; in the years since, said its founder, Arun Alagappan, academic tutoring has grown by 200 percent.

�More and more you have ambitious and intellectually curious students signing up for difficult classes,� said Mr. Alagappan, whose 200 tutors bill $195 to $795 for 50 minutes (though he said pro bono tutoring accounted for 26 percent of the work). �It�s no longer O.K. to have one-on-one coaching for sailing but not academics.�

What is most troubling to those trying to curtail academic tutoring is that instead of remedial help for struggling students, more and more of it seems to be for those trying to get ahead in the intensely competitive college-application race. Gone are the days of a student who was excellent at math and science just getting by in English and history; now, everyone is expected to be strong in everything (including fencing, chess, woodworking and violin).

As more solid or even stellar students hire expensive tutors, the achievement bar rises, and getting ahead quickly becomes keeping up.

�B used to mean good,� said Victoria Goldman, author of �The Manhattan Family Guide to Private Schools and Selective Public Schools� and a Riverdale board member until 2007. �Everyone�s forgotten that.�

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I find it amusing to observe the college admissions arms race in NYC, perhaps because my children are still young and I don't live there.

The ideal of equal opportunity will never be achieved in a free society where parents are able to purchase extras for their children, whether its private schools, tutors, or (at the cost of one salary) a SAHM (or part-time-employed mom) who homeschools or tutors her children. It is the role of government to provide a basic level of educational opportunity for everyone, not to equalize things.

just annoys me. i left NYC area a year ago, along with all the tuition i was paying to a private gifted school where DS was bored and unchallenged, many of the kids just had the money to go there and they seem to have a flexible minimum IQ to keep those seats full. i heard of tutoring as early as gr K and of course many in that situation eventually dropped out.

People were freaking out in PreK and K about going to top high schools (then you see little johnny standing there oblivious with his finger up his nose) I knew families on waiting lists in NYC that drove an hour to school out of their burough for kindergarten because they needed the gifted ed. and couldn't get it meanwhile the spot they needed is taken up by kids that had IQ test prepping etc

i couldn't stand the parents any longer either, you know the ones with the Special Ray of Gifted Sunshine for kids (you know, not gifted, dad does the math, mom makes the science fair projects, they funded every field trip and the new playground equipment :P Sorry, venting.

Sandy Bass is mistaken when she states, "There's no family that gets through private school without an SAT tutor." Neither my daughter, a recent Riverdale grad, nor my son, at Dalton, used an SAT tutor, much less a subject tutor. It's not necessary.

This hyper-competitiveness is horribly unhealthy for the students. And I don't think it's coming from the schools. Riverdale, in particular, is a terrific place, with caring, dedicated teachers and administrators who truly care about educating kids, and they don't make a big deal about grades.

You do not have to buy into the madness. Teenagers should be having fun, as well as learning, during high school. Everyone, please realize that this trend, while troubling, is not as widespread as the Times piece suggests.

The parents spending tens of thousands of dollars on tutoring, in addition to private school tuition, desperately want their children to go to the "best" colleges. A comment on the NYT site explains the disadvantages of doing this.

http://community.nytimes.com/commen...lessons-of-tutoring/?permid=24#comment24

Phoebe
New York
June 8th, 2011
7:05 am
My parents lined me up with tutors in practically every subject when I was in high school ten years ago (private school in NYC). I remember that the prices were astronomically high, but my parents were afraid not to give me the same advantages that many of my classmates were getting. I have mixed feelings about tutoring. While it was helpful to have one-on-one assistance in math, for example, all of the extra help made me feel as though I wasn't able to do it on my own. I'm still dealing with these insecurities a decade later. I have trouble believing that I would have gotten into a top college without the tutoring. When I was at college, I avoided courses similar to those I struggled with in high school because I was afraid how I'd do without tutoring. I don't regret all of the tutoring, but it certainly didn't boost my self-confidence and made me doubt many of my academic accomplishments. A note to parents--instead of signing up for tutoring with the expensive services out there, try to find a grad student who wants to make some extra money. You won't pay more than $50 an hour for a fabulous PhD student.

Neither did I.

But I did do all the problems in the book and bought some old books and did those problems, too.

As for the SAT, I did not use a tutor, either.

thank you for this perspective.

I'm glad to hear the practice isn't so widespread. At the same time, I'm not surprised to hear that it happens or that people spend tens of thousands of dollars on tutors when they already spend as much on tuition.

The practice looks insane if you believe that school is a place for learning. But it makes perfect sense if you see certain private schools and high scores on standardized tests as the lower rungs on the ladder of prestigious outcomes. I suppose you could also call it tiger tutoring and see it as an unsurprising part of tiger parenting --- not necessarily a part of that philosophy, but certainly in harmony with some of its tenets.

IMHO alert: we live in a society that's increasingly over-focused on narrow definitions of getting ahead via defined paths (e.g. we measure "learning" by high scores on standardized tests, we tell kids that everyone must go to college and Ivy League Schools are better, etc.). In these circumstances, the tutoring thing is hardly surprising. It's more a natural next step in the process of escalating the stakes in...whatever these people see themselves battling.

I'd love to hear parental justifications for over-the-top (OTT) tutoring, past what was in the article ("If I am an affluent person, why wouldn�t I help my kid out?�). This idea seems terribly shallow and arbitrary. Help your kid how, exactly? Help him attain your definition of success? I doubt that OTT tutoring plants the seeds of love of learning. Plus, if Mom and Dad have so little faith in very expensive schools, why are they sending their kids there (out of diploma cynicism)? Or is it that they have so little faith in their kids? Or just that they're marching in line with others and not thinking?

I feel sorry for the kids. No one seems to have told their parents that even if you win the rat race, you're still a rat.

I don't approve of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on things like this. That seems crazy!
Just to play the devil's advocate: alot of gifted parents on this site provide after-school enrichment to their child, b/c their child needs and wants it. It could be having your child take music lessons. It could be that you sit with your child and help him/her with math homework or to learn math at a faster pace, because you like math and they do too. Etc.
That seems pretty reasonable.
Or if your child is struggling with math and you can't remember enough math from way back when to help, you hire a high school kid to tutor them. Or you pay money for them to go to the Kumon center.
But is this different conceptually from having these high-priced tutors for the SAT, etc? It's the same.
I used to teach for Kaplan, back in the day, for SAT, ACT, and later MCAT. You can boost your scores with these programs. It might only be a little, for you to learn the format of the test. Or it could be alot as you re-learn the geometry you forgot.
Unfortunately, these tests will help determine where you go to college, which could ultimately determine what job you get, how much money you make, etc. It is foolish not to prepare for these tests in SOME way. You can buy for $50 some good books at the bookstore and download free tests from the internet to prepare, so I don't know if hiring private tutors necessarily gets you more than that.