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Looks like another story that will bash "helicopter parents" who are too involved in their children’s education.
"One expert told me (for a story I’m working on for InTown: Westchester on Helicopter Parents) that the pressure to succeed begins in elementary school. Parents are using tutors for their elementary school kids not for remedial help, but for enrichment and to get them ahead, says Lisa Jacobson of Inspirica, a tutoring and test prep service based in Manhattan (inspirica.com). Ahead at age six! What’s happening to this world?"
So Little Time
Yeah, I’m looking to "enrich" my daughter so she knows her times tables in fourth grade!
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2 comments:
yes!
absolutely!
Across the board, everything "wealthy parents" do is subject to scathing criticsm.
Ditto everything poor parents do.
If parents are hiring tutors, that's not to provide "enrichment" that's to "get ahead."
Irvington School District, I now have it on "good authority," has adopted this point of view.
The question of how many tutors are being hired is going to be ignored on grounds that Westchester parents hire tutors when their children don't need them.
One mom told me she had so many tutors traipsing in and out of her house last year the place was like Tutor Central.
But that has nothing to do with the quality of the school.
This column in WSJ was written by a mom who homeschools.
Educational Supplements
By MEGHAN COX GURDON
June 16, 2006; Page W11
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Back in the 1980s, when Japanese financiers gobbled up U.S. companies like so many Pacmen, Americans became unnerved. Japanese society seemed scarily focused: The discipline in schools was so brutal that a tardy child might be crushed to death by the doors slamming shut precisely on time. We heard about juku, cram schools where Japanese children went each afternoon after regular classes for three hours more of academic drilling; Saturdays, too.
Americans joked about how we'd all be carrying yen in our wallets someday, but we could comfort ourselves -- and people did -- by saying that at least our children were individuals. American childhood was to be enjoyed, not grimly marched through with joyless eyes fixed on getting into the Ivy League.
Ah, but will you look at us now? We're building a juku system of our own. Millions of American children no longer have the time to kick a ball around after school because they're already late for an appointment with the math tutor or a "study skills" lesson or cognitive skills training or Spanish immersion or "reading comprehension support" or academic enrichment of one sort of another.
[snip]
....tutors have long been a fixture of both ends of the bell curve. Struggling children got help to keep afloat at grade level; super-bright children might see tutors to challenge them further. What's happening now is different. Tutoring has become near ubiquitous among the panicky classes: middle- and upper-middle-income families where there are ample brains and money.
Today it's not uncommon for six-year-olds to receive private lessons in how to overcome "executive function issues," for if they can't handle the paperwork in first grade, heaven help them in the cutthroat bureaucracy of third. Middle-schoolers see tutors to boost their math and reading skills, and thus help them get into the right high school; high-schoolers sign up for private SAT prep...
[snip]
"In 1989 I would mumble, 'I'm a tutor,' and hang my head a little, because it seemed a marginal job," says David Kahn, who runs a tutoring company in Manhattan. "People used to think it meant I was poor, and now they think it means I'm rich."
There is no real mystery about why tutoring has become such a growth industry. It can be traced in part to the proliferation of standardized tests. At Kaplan, the biggest corporate tutor, the number of students in its test prep and after-school programs has more than doubled since 1998. According to the research firm Eduventures, schools spent $879 million on corporate tutoring and test prep in the 2004/2005 academic year -- 25.2% more than the year before. Uncle Sam is giving tutoring a boost too. Under No Child Left Behind, the federal government pays for the tutoring of any kid in a failing school. (This market in tutoring for low-income students barely existed six years ago.) In all, Americans spend more than $4 billion a year on tutoring.
The propelling force behind this revenue stream is, of course, modern parents: a whole generation of anxious, competitive, aspirational parents who agonize about whether their children are doing well enough, or missing out on anything, or, God forbid, falling behind in some crucial way.
[snip]
It is a truth universally acknowledged among teachers and tutors that modern parents want their children to do exceptionally well. They demand A's, not B's. They expect stratospheric SAT scores. Anecdote suggests, however, that they seldom want to spend any time in pursuit of these goals themselves.
[snip]
But parents are not simply shirking their own responsibility, they are encouraging kids not to take any. "There is a tutor culture [of] parents who don't let their children fail once in a while. They're scared it'll look bad on their record," says Caleb Rossiter, a professor at American University, who has noticed this trend even on the college level. This semester, he gave a failing grade to a lackadaisical student. The girl's mother, a lawyer, immediately phoned: "She said, 'We want to challenge this grade. My daughter can't afford to flunk.'" When Mr. Rossiter declined to change the girl's grade, the family asked about finding a tutor. "I said, 'I am her tutor,'" he laughs. "I have office hours. You're paying $40,000 a year, and yet your daughter has never once come to see me."
[snip]
...the spread of a high-grade, get-ahead academic ethos that is decoupled from an actual, mind-broadening education. On NPR recently, a reporter asked 87-year-old Hazel Haley, who just retired after 67 years of teaching English in a Florida high school, how today's teenagers differed from the ones she taught generations ago. She gave this dispiriting response: "Today's young people [think], 'I'll learn it for the test, I'll do well on the test, and then I will flush it.'"
Mr. Kahn, the Manhattan tutor, notices the same thing. He sees a distressing number of children who are "completely burnt out and won't accomplish anything in college because they were driven through high school the way an associate is driven through a law firm."
"For many kids," Mr. Kahn says, "getting into college is such an ordeal that once they're there, they just kick back." Shades of juku again: In Japan, cram schools focus on getting into university, not necessarily getting much out of it. It's a shame that we're importing that frame of mind.
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