Tutor restoration: Test-prep firms like The Princeton Review are invading America's grade schools. This is: a good. b bad

Washington Monthly, Dec, 2002 by Siobhan Gorman

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 ... 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 al! the same obstacles that have ruined other federal efforts to aid poor students.