To Tutor or Not to Tutor - That is not the question

Yesterday The Globe and Mail ran an article about the growing trend towards outside tutoring. The thrust of the article is that parents are trying to give their kids a leg up by engaging outside tutors, and this is of course the spin that status quo educators are trying to apply to the trend. Because if the reason most parents are engaging outside tutors is that the children are struggling in school, then - gasp - that would mean that the schools are falling down on the job.

A couple of the comments to the article suggest that the latter scenario is actually closer to the truth. Dieter HH, for example, points to "general grade inflation, dumbed down curriculum, 'everybody passes' psychobabble', adding that "the expansion in tutoring is merely a metric that reflects the concerns of parents about the deficiencies in our education system". Thrym interestingly writes "I believe that the growth of tutoring use is artificially propping up the performance of the school system on standardized testing scores. When one-third of all students are educated in subjects such as mathematics and reading comprehension outside the regular school system, often at great expense in time and money by frustrated parents, what does this say about what goes on during the regular school day?  (more...)

To Tutor or Not to Tutor - That is not the question