REASON #498: To Cut Out the Middle Man

From the KitchenTableMath blog:
There is a phenomenal amount of tutoring going on in affluent school districts. Phenomenal. One of the tutors working in my town told a friend of mine that she estimates half of the kids in Scarsdale are tutored.

I've come to think it was inevitable that matters would develop in this way.

First of all, public schools are built to provide inputs, not outputs: instruction, not achievement.

That may not have been so deadly when schools grouped kids homogeneously. With homogeneous grouping the classroom teacher probably had a decent chance of knowing where the kids were and of being able to teach to their level.

Along comes the de-tracking movement, and now you've got heterogeneously grouped classrooms with kids all over the map in terms of readiness. The inputs model hasn't changed, so teachers are told to teach to the middle, or they're told to differentiate instruction, and when teaching to the middle or differentiating instruction work for some of the kids but not all of the kids, you assume the problem is the kid, not the school. After all, the school's job is to provide opportunities to learn, and as long as you've put PowerPoints on the SMARTBoard, you've done that.

Then add to this set-up school districts in which the vast majority of parents are college-educated and affluent enough to hire tutors, and what do you get?

You get "high-performing" schools where the kids are being retaught by parents and tutored by tutors.