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Tutor
Restoration
Test-prep firms like Princeton Review are invading our
grade schools. This is: a) good. b) bad.
by Siobhan Gorman, The
Washington Monthly Online, December 2002
For more articles visit
www.bridges4kids.org.
In a country where high school kids of every stripe seem to
favor the same uniforms of baggy pants or midriff-baring
shirts, it can be hard to spot differences in class
background. But one giveaway for juniors and seniors lies in
the contents of their backpacks--there's a good chance that
the more affluent will be toting test-prep materials from
companies like Kaplan and Princeton Review. These are the top
firms that teach courses designed to give kids a leg up on
those all-important college-entrance exams, the SAT and ACT,
as well as graduate school equivalents like the GMAT and LSAT.
Such programs have long been controversial because, at $1,000
per 12-session course, they provide children of the affluent
yet another unfair advantage in life, teaching them how to
game the tests that largely determine admission to selective
colleges and universities--tests that are themselves of
dubious intellectual value.
Now, after years of exacerbating class differences among the
college-bound, test-prep companies are expanding their
offerings downward to cover children as young as six. The
reason is the testing mania spawned by the school reform
movement. In the 1990s, outraged by the low quality of so many
public schools, many states, encouraged by Washington, imposed
rigorous tests that students must pass before they can advance
to the next grade. Sensing an opportunity, companies like
Kaplan Inc. began developing prep courses for those tests and
marketing them to the anxious parents of K-through-12
students. This fever peaked last year with the passage of
President Bush's No Child Left Behind Act, which requires such
tests for every public school student in America in grades
three through eight by 2006. Schools failing to meet annual
test score standards for three straight years risk being shut
down or reconstituted with new teachers, and their students
must be offered private tutoring vouchers paid for by the
federal government. Unsurprisingly, test-prep companies see
the law, and especially its provision for federal tutoring
vouchers, as a vast new opportunity. "The market for test prep
is on fire," says Amy Wilkins, a senior analyst at the
Education Trust.
To see these courses at work, I recently visited Kaplan's
Score! Educational Center in Alexandria, Va. Sandwiched
between a Whole Foods Market and a Starbucks in a typical
suburban strip mall, the center was teeming with eager
grade-schoolers, some of them fresh from soccer practice in
red jerseys and cleats. Academic competitiveness was already
in full bloom. "I want to be ahead of people, not behind
them," announced one of the young soccer players, Kayvon
Naghdi, who can recite by heart his score on the Virginia
Standards of Learning test. Said Jessica Peraertz, proud
mother of eight-year-old Isabella, "I think [Kaplan] has
actually made her be ahead of other kids in her class." As
students stationed themselves before computers for a two-hour
tutoring class, parents hovered nearby monitoring their
children's progress or ducked out to grab a latte. The one
constant was that they seemed every bit as determined for
their child to excel as those of older students eyeing Yale
and Harvard.
Critics of high-stakes tests are up in arms against this
creeping obsession. "There is this testing bandwagon momentum
that is really getting out of hand," says Arnold F. Fege,
president of Public Advocacy for Kids and a longtime activist
for public schools. Critics like Fege worry that, like the SAT
test prep, kiddie test prep will inordinately benefit children
of the affluent; that it will draw money and emphasis from
classroom learning; and that it will stress tactics and
strategy over actual learning. "It reduces the motivation for
learning to simply beating the tests," says Monty Neill,
executive director of Massachusetts-based FairTest. "The test
prep companies are sort of vultures picking at the body of the
school."
As a matter of fact, this new test prep boom may actually do
more good than harm. Indeed, if it's done right, K-12 test
prep could have the opposite effect of what its critics
anticipate, helping close the achievement gap rather than
widen it, increase student learning rather than distract from
it, and perhaps serve as one of the keys to effective
standards-based education.
Teaching Kids to Score
At the Alexandria Score! center, one student stood apart from
the rest. A study in urban-suburban contrast, 17-year-old
Antwain Proctor sported a bright white t-shirt with "Score!"
emblazoned on the back, baggy denim shorts, a nylon headband,
and a stone in his left ear. Antwain had recently completed
his sophomore year in high school, reading at just a
second-grade level, with math skills at a fifth-grade level.
Given his age and performance level, conceded Score!'s David
Smith, "he's not our typical student." But he is a testimony
to the possibilities of test prep.
Antwain escaped an abusive father only to drift between foster
homes until his aunt, Shirley Proctor, adopted him four years
ago. He has repeatedly failed Maryland's high-school exit
exams and is awaiting the results of the math exam he retook
in October. Desperate to get her son up to speed, Shirley
signed him up for weekly visits to the Alexandria Score!
center this summer, with encouraging results: After just four
months, Antwain has gained almost a full grade level in both
math and reading.
On the day I visited, he was plugging away at a computer
terminal. As I watched, a math question flashed on his screen:
"11x13=?" Antwain scratched away on a clipboard and typed in
his answer, 26. Try again, the computer told him. Antwain
raised his hand, and one of the center's "coaches" came over.
"One times one is two, right?" Antwain asked.
"One times anything is itself, remember?"
They went back through the problem together, step by step, on
Antwain's clipboard.
Companies like Kaplan and Princeton Review earned their
reputations by helping students beat college entrance exams,
but as this episode indicates, their programs for elementary
and middle school tests--especially for kids who are lagging
in school--seem to be different. The SAT, not directly based
on any curriculum, is a distinctly more abstract measure of
aptitude and cleverness. Consequently, SAT test-prep courses
teach test-taking strategies designed to maximize one's score,
not a formal body of knowledge. Good state tests, on the other
hand, measure whether a student has mastered the curriculum
taught in the classroom. So test-prep courses like Antwain's
focus on learning the material supposed to have been learned
in school. This sort of prep work is less tactical, and more
like homework. Because state-standard tests are supposed to
measure actual learning, prep courses teach substance over
strategy.
A sampling of test-prep publications indicates that their
materials do seem more academically oriented than SAT-prep
books. Kaplan's "No-Stress Guide to the 8th Grade MCAS," for
the Massachusetts test offers lessons on fractions,
percentages, and geometry as well as help with writing and
reading comprehension. Which is not to say that it lacks tips
for gaming the exam. The math section, for example, offers a
strategic reminder to study up on triangles "since they are
the MCAS makers' favorite shape." And the English composition
section advises students to pay more attention to arguments
than to grammar because the test assigns more points for the
essay's content. But on the whole, the emphasis appears to be
on learning.
The emphasis on teaching certainly seems to be benefiting
Antwain. His mother is thrilled that he's finally learned how
to sound out words. "I feel like I'm learning more," he told
me in between math exercises. "Since I've been coming here,
I've been doing better."
In fact, good test prep, says Eva Baker, a testing expert and
education professor at the University of California-Los
Angeles, could be a real boon to poor children. She likens it
to the Japanese "jukus," the extraordinarily popular
after-school prep programs for children who are gunning to
pass the highly competitive middle and high school entrance
exams that determine their academic future. "My experience has
been--it was counterintuitive--but what I saw going on [in the
jukus] was more fun and more interesting for the kids than
what I saw going on in the school," she said. "If they were
simply drudgery, the kids wouldn't want to go, and they would
complain." Antwain's case bears this out. "He doesn't look at
it as doing school work," says his mother, who sends two of
her children to Score!. "Some days, I don't feel like driving
there. But they bug me about going."
Antwain is lucky. He has a devoted adoptive mother who is
determined to help him in school and can foot the $129 monthly
bill for Score!. "I'm handling it," she says. "Sometimes
you've got to cut back other things, [but] as long as he
passes, and he can come out reading, then it's all worth it."
But as critics point out, many, if not most, poorer students
in failing schools have neither the parental backing nor the
money to attend test-prep courses, so what's the chance that
they'll get this kind of preparation?
The answer is: pretty good. That's because of another crucial
difference between the SAT and state-level tests: Nobody gives
poor kids money to prep for the SAT, and so only students
whose parents can afford it benefit. But under the new Bush
plan, the federal government will commit a
still-to-be-determined amount of money for tutoring services
like K-12 test prep, most of which will be directed to failing
schools in low-income areas--in other words, its greatest
benefits should accrue to those least likely to be able to
afford traditional test prep.
Robbing the Cradle
Test-prep companies have already realized that the real money
for elementary and middle school test prep may lie in the
city, not the suburbs, and are planning accordingly. "It's not
the Scarsdales of the world who are looking for our services,"
says Stephen Kutno of Princeton Review. "It is the Washington
D.C.s, the Baltimores, the Yonkerses Š That's where the market
is."
Both Princeton Review and Kaplan began marketing to younger
students with pilot projects in the 1990s. Kaplan, which
targeted suburban parents who had the money for test prep with
clinics like the one in Alexandria, now operates 150 Score!
centers. Princeton Review developed a different strategy,
selling its services to schools, not to individual parents (an
approach that Kaplan also later adopted; it now offers courses
in 500 schools). Today, Princeton Review runs programs in
2,000 schools in 30 states. Kutno estimates that about 80
percent of its business is in urban areas because that's where
the need is and where state money has been available to pay
for it. Now that the federal government is getting into the
private education services area, Kutno says his company's
business plan is to pursue more of the same.
Without large-scale studies, it is impossible to know how
much, if any, such programs will boost youngsters' skills and
test scores, but the numbers available are encouraging.
Kaplan's Score! program in Brooklyn, its most popular and
lowest-income center, reported that on average its students
improved 1.2 grade levels in reading and 1.7 grade levels in
math after six to nine months. An independent survey of test
scores in five Texas schools showed that Princeton Review was
significantly narrowing the achievement gap between low
performers and their higher-achieving peers.
Flailing Schools
So, test prep holds promise for low-income students, and
there's federal money to pay for it (a typical K-12 test-prep
course costs $600--roughly the per-capita amount that most
lawmakers expect the Bush tutoring vouchers to disburse). But
that doesn't mean it will work. Tutoring vouchers face all the
same obstacles that have ruined other federal efforts to aid
poor students.
First, test prep truly boosts learning only if the tests
themselves measure the same learning that was supposed to have
been imparted in the classroom--presuming, of course, that the
classroom curriculum itself is of high quality. Good tests
must both cover the important material in the state curriculum
and apply sophisticated measures like essay questions to gauge
whether a child actually learned the material, as opposed to
simpler tests that can be gamed by regurgitating memorized
facts. Some states do have both strong curriculum and high
quality tests, including Connecticut, Massachusetts, and
Michigan. However, many states, like California, rely on cheap
off-the-shelf tests like the "Stanford-9" that aren't really
tied to the state curriculum. Likewise, Oregon, New Mexico,
and Montana received failing grades in a recent Princeton
Review Study that measured how well state tests reflect the
state curriculum. This is a crucial shortcoming that the No
Child Left Behind Act failed to fix (see "Bush's Big Test," by
Thomas Toch, November 2001).
Second, there are bureaucratic obstacles. One of the biggest
concerns for both Kaplan and Princeton Review is that school
districts will make it too difficult for parents to sign up.
Teachers' unions may try to block the programs, and if schools
don't take an active role in alerting parents, they may not be
aware of the benefits. Princeton Review's Kutno recounted a
recent such shortfall in Pennsylvania in which a complicated
payment reimbursement setup appears to have led to a low
participation rate in a state program for outside tutoring. As
a result, Kutno decided not to seek a contract there because
he feared both an insufficient market and a bookkeeping
nightmare. "It wasn't a prudent business decision," he
explains. State and local laws may also prove burdensome.
Kaplan was rejected by North Carolina because it couldn't
promise that all of its teachers would have three years'
experience.
Third, good test prep can't be carried out on the cheap. Both
companies offer school-based tutoring programs that rely
largely on local public school teachers to impart the
curriculum. School boards prefer it that way because it's
cheaper--Kaplan charges four times as much to send one of
their own instructors to teach a class as it does to train a
teacher how to do it. This puts poor kids at a number of
disadvantages. Low-performing schools got that way because the
quality of teaching isn't too hot. There's little reason to
believe that lousy teachers will become effective test-prep
instructors with a few hours of training by Kaplan.
Additionally, failing schools tend to experience high teacher
turnover, and so training teachers can be expensive and
fruitless for cash-strapped schools. And teachers, or at least
their union leaders, tend to be the greatest opponents of
high-stakes testing--hardly the type likely to embrace the
benefits of test prep. Plus, in a time of shrinking state
budgets, test-prep companies worry that states will find
creative ways to funnel the new federal money for tutoring
into day-to-day school operations. "We've had situations where
money was allocated for programs like Princeton Review and
after the state budget process those monies disappeared," says
Kutno.
A final obstacle may prove to be found at home. Test-prep
programs for poor kids will work only if parents are motivated
enough to seek them out. Had Antwain remained suspended in
foster care, there's little reason to think that he'd have
made it to Score! even if it had been freely available through
federal funding. Still, for children whose parents do take
advantage, quality test prep could mean the difference between
graduating from high school and dropping out.
It is a sad comment on the state of many public schools that a
separate private system has to be set up to help kids master
material they should have learned in the classroom. It would,
of course, make more sense to fix the schools themselves. The
No Child Left Behind Act may help do that, though much more
will be needed, including more money and better teachers. But
until the schools start doing their job, the test-prep
programs offered by companies like Princeton Review and Kaplan
could turn out to be the only hope that many kids have of
getting through school with the basics of an education. For
that reason alone, they're worth rooting for.
Siobhan Gorman is a reporter for National Journal. This
article was supported by a grant from the Thomas B. Fordham
Foundation.
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