Private Tutoring Centers—A Bigger Deal than You Think (with Joshua Goodman)

Kumon, Sylvan Learning, Mathnasium, and Huntington Learning Center—these private tutoring chains are familiar names, but they have received little attention from education researchers.

According to recent research co-authored by Josh Goodman, however, this is an oversight. Not only has the number of private tutoring centers tripled since the late 1990s, but private tutoring centers also might have a surprisingly large effect on district achievement trends.

To find out more, on this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus speaks with Josh Goodman. Nat and Josh discuss what instruction looks like at private tutoring centers, which families send their children to private tutoring centers most often, whether tutoring might explain why East Asian countries do better on international assessments, why the number of private tutoring centers peaked in 2015, whether private tutoring centers might be insulating high-achieving students from downward achievement trends, what American schools can learn from private tutoring centers, whether giving families vouchers for private tutoring centers would have been an effective method for fighting pandemic learning loss, why big tutoring chains often outperform other tutoring centers, and why private tutoring centers might be a more cost-effective way to raise student achievement than most other interventions.

Joshua Goodman is a professor of education and economics at Boston University and the co-author of Kumon Up: Private Tutoring Centers and Student Achievement and Kumon In: The Recent, Rapid Rise of Private Tutoring Centers.

This episode was produced by Elli Lucas.