Tuesday, May 13, 2003

The Real Private Education K-12 Market



The private education market in the United States is called tutoring. Where dozens of private corporations and individual tutors compete to fill the academic holes left by the inadequacy of the public schools.

Consider:

• Sylvan Learning Centers has added more than 500 centers in the past 10 years, growing from 449 in 1993 to 960 this year.

• Princeton Review, known for standardized test preparation classes, attracted fewer than 39,000 students to its company-owned sites in 2000. By 2002, more than 81,000 had come for extra help. Over the same period, revenues for the test-preparation division soared from $34 million to $66 million.

• Kumon Math & Reading Centers helped 33,000 students in the United States to master their basics in 1992. This year, that figure exceeds 120,000.

• The number of individuals nationwide offering private tutoring for a fee has increased from 250,000 five years ago to more than 1 million today, according to the National Tutoring Association in Indianapolis.



How inefficient is our education system that we support billions a year for a state education system, while parents pay billions more for a private system to teach their kids reading and math. Let's cut to the chase and just enroll the kids in Kumon or Sylvan.

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