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This really is the mystery of affluent, "high-performing" schools.
I was talking to my Scarsdale friend yesterday. She said Scarsdale has an earth science teacher so bad people hire tutors as soon as they find out their kids are going to be in his class.
Why is that?
Why has such a situation been allowed to develop, and why has it been allowed to persist?
CA Math Frameworks: "responsibilities of parents" (scroll down)
why do we have so many tutors?
parents are the problem
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5 comments:
I think it's that combination of image plus affluence. People are afraid that something's "wrong" with their child and that it couldn't possibly be the school or teacher creating the roadblock. Add that to high expectations for performance/college entrance and that keep up with the Jones' spirit kicks in.
High performing schools are commonly found in affluent areas where parents have the disposable income to pay for the tutoring and in some cases, less perceived opportunity to be "involved" personally.
Voila... the recipe for tutoring mecca.
"Why has such a situation been allowed to develop, and why has it been allowed to persist?"
Union contracts, a combination of a motivated minority and a lackadaisical majority when it comes to their negotiation, and a functional monopoly in providing education.
The terms to remember are "market failure" and "rent seeking".
People are afraid that something's "wrong" with their child and that it couldn't possibly be the school or teacher creating the roadblock.
That's not our situation.
Kids are getting tutored here because they're getting Cs, Ds, and Fs on tests.
They're getting tutored for the same reasons kids have always gotten tutored: they're not learning the material in class, from the teacher.
This is my question.
Why does this situation exist in a $21,000 per pupil district, and why does it persist?
What is rent seeking, exactly?
The wikipedia article on rent seeking looks decent. From that article:
"Rent seeking generally implies the extraction of uncompensated value from others without making any contribution to productivity, such as by gaining control of land and other pre-existing natural resources, or by imposing burdensome regulations or other government decisions that may affect consumers or businesses.
[snip]
Most studies of rent seeking focus on efforts to capture special monopoly privileges, such as government regulation of free enterprise competition...."
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