Teaching One-on-One

Is your daughter flunking English? Does your son avoid his weekly spelling test like the plague?

Rest easy. Evan Postal is on the job--and this literacy doctor makes house calls. A special education teacher by training, he can diagnose your child’s reading problems, prescribe a remedy and administer treatment. All for $45 an hour.

Postal is among a thriving corps of moonlighting teachers, college students and others who are filling educational gaps as tutors while cashing in on society’s increased emphasis on reading skills and academic success.

The boom in individualized instruction is being felt not only in schools and homes but in suburban malls as well, where commercial chains such as Sylvan Learning Centers hang their shingle next to stores like the Gap. Tutors can even be ordered over the Internet; just type in your ZIP Code at Web sites such as https://www.tutor.com and choose from dozens of names near your house.

The frenzy is fueling a little-noticed industry, generating an estimated $3 billion in annual revenues--and, parents say, providing a valuable service for children whose reading problems may go unaddressed in busy classrooms.

Even schools themselves are seizing on tutoring as a solution for struggling students.

The initiatives include Reading Recovery, an expensive program that uses teachers to tutor lagging first-graders in more than 6,000 schools nationwide but costs upward of $8,000 per student.

The program can be found in Los Angeles Unified. The district also announced last year that it would spend $10 million to hire outside tutoring services--including Sylvan and Kaplan Learning Services--to bolster student skills at its lowest-performing elementary schools. However, that effort has since been abandoned.

“The tutoring marketplace is just exploding right now,” said Peter Stokes, executive vice president of Eduventures.com, a market research firm in Boston.

The marketplace also features plenty of unsubstantiated claims, experts say.

“There is a lot of hype in this area,” said George Farkas, a sociologist who heads the Center for Education and Social Policy at the University of Texas at Dallas. “There are a lot of people selling things.”

Adding to the tutoring throngs are myriad nonprofit campaigns springing up like wild grass. The efforts are coordinated by recreation centers, churches, synagogues and other organizations such as the Los Angeles Times.

Politicians, too, are jumping into the fray. President Clinton likes to tout his administration’s own pet tutoring project--the America Reads Challenge--which provides college students with federal work-study funds for tutoring children in reading. Clinton has promoted the effort by calling for an army of 1 million reading tutors nationwide.

Need for Tutors Is Called ‘Immense’

Whether for profit or goodwill, tutoring has become a purported panacea for children who can’t seem to master reading, math and other basics in school--even if eager volunteers lack adequate training and companies offer little research to validate their claims.

Some of the students have learning disabilities that impair their ability to read or write. Others, prompted by parents, are looking for a competitive edge. Still more are too embarrassed to ask for help at school and feel more comfortable in a private setting.

“The need is immense,” said Postal, who gets five to 10 inquiries for his after-school services each time report cards go home. “There are a lot of people out there who do [tutoring], but there are a lot of people who are not very good.”

Postal spends three or four afternoons a week at the homes of clients around Los Angeles.

His roster includes 10-year-old Cullen Pinney. The San Fernando Valley boy began seeing Postal 2 1/2 years ago, when he was trailing his third-grade classmates in reading.

Postal tried several strategies. He taught Cullen to recognize that different letters of the alphabet create distinct sounds. Cullen also learned how to position his mouth and tongue to distinguish sounds of speech--for example, repeating “word” and “world.”

Postal has also made sessions fun with games such as Trouble and Husker Du.

Cullen’s mother, Cindy, says Postal has offered important one-on-one attention unavailable at Cullen’s private school, where classes have as many as 35 students. As a result, Pinney said, her son has made substantial progress and now reads at about the same level as his fellow fifth-graders.

“Evan has gotten results,” Pinney said. “He was able to diagnose where Cullen needed help. The attention helped him a lot.”

Postal also now sees Cullen’s younger brother, 7-year-old William, to keep his skills sharp. Both boys are fans of the weekly session.

“It’s just fun,” Cullen said. “It helps.”

Postal does not offer guarantees. Some do.

Sylvan, one of the nation’s largest tutoring enterprises, promises that students will improve at least one full letter grade in reading or math after 36 hours of instruction. If not, the company promises to provide an additional 12 hours of service for free.

Company Vice President Richard Bavaria said that eight out of 10 students meet the goal, but he could not cite any independent studies to verify the claim.

Still, the company is thriving. Sylvan now has 789 learning centers in the United States and Canada, up from 570 in 1995. Sylvan’s parent company, Sylvan Learning Systems, earned $440 million last year through its learning centers, tutoring programs in schools and testing services, nearly five times what it made in 1995.

Bavaria said Sylvan centers employ certified teachers who assess children’s skills regularly, allowing them to advance to more difficult material only after they understand their current work, a process known as mastery learning. “The major reason why Sylvan works is the student-teacher ratio of 3 to 1,” Bavaria said. “The teachers can give individualized attention to these kids. It’s that attention that is the beauty of tutoring.”

Qualified Tutors Can Pay Off

Research on the effectiveness of tutoring is thin, offering little in the way of independent evaluations. But Farkas of the University of Texas, who has developed his own tutoring program, said such initiatives can pay off when highly trained tutors spend enough time with children.

He said qualified tutors who work about 50 hours over a school year and follow a detailed curriculum can raise the skills of a low-performing student by half a grade--the equivalent of about five months of progress.

Even tutors with as little as one hour of training can make a difference by exposing children to books and sharing a positive attitude toward reading, according to Russell Gersten, a University of Oregon education professor who has evaluated tutoring in his state and reviewed research on the subject.

“What we found in Oregon is that minimally trained tutors can do pretty good with kids, better than one can expect,” said Gersten, director of the Eugene Research Institute, which focuses on reading and special education.

So what makes a good tutor?

Experts say it’s a combination of knowledge of reading skills and the belief that any child can learn, regardless of ability, language or income level.

“[We’re talking about] someone who is open to learning about children and learning styles and the reading process,” said Carol Rasco, director of the America Reads Challenge, which has helped recruit 20,000 tutors on college campuses nationwide.

“Someone who is realistic in their expectations about a child’s behavior. Otherwise, we might do some behavioral damage while we are doing academic skill building,” she said.