Linking Back: Class sizes, Hurdles, and Happiness

Boy, what a quick week - and not much newsworthy items when it comes to education, tutoring, and the like. But here's what I rounded up:

- More on the debate of long trips to get to school, from CNN.

- Debatable results from this study on stay-at-home children vs. foster children.

- Happiness and taxes - this link is not perfectly related to the typical CK blog post, but is interesting nonetheless.

- More hurdles to becoming a teacher, from the NY Times.

- And finally, an excerpt from this post:

Anxiety is a cousin of the avalanche about to roll, but it is more about uncertainty than an emerging, disruptive trend. Examples of anxiety themes abound: (1) Financial services companies urging baby boomers to hurry up and invest more for retirement: “You’re 55. Will you have your needed $3.2 million to retire comfortably?” (2) Tutoring companies planting seeds of doubt about whether our kids will score well enough on the SATs to get into a good college. Although anxiety themes grab attention, go easy. People are becoming skeptical, and rightly so. Too many politicians, companies have bombarded us with FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) with no facts to back up their point.

I'd like to point out that #2 isn't what all tutoring companies do :-)

The benefits of tutoring?

Interesting article in the Washington Post today about federally funded tutors. I did not know that students that fail to meet targets for 3 years in a row get federally funded tutoring - but it seems like this provision is paying off, at least for some students. The more important question this article raises is whether tutoring is, at its core, helpful and/or essential.

Here's why it's helpful and/or essential - sometimes a teacher's style does not connect well with a certain student, leading to results that are not up to a student's (or parent's) desired level. This difficulty to connect is no surprise because most class sizes have enough students that a teacher can't teach directly to every student whereas in a 1 to 1 tutoring session a (good) tutor can adapt to a student's needs. To me, this is the chief benefit of tutoring over teaching in a classroom. It's also why I've never understood certain services that offer to do test prep or class tutoring but all they're do is cram 15-20 students in a room and teach them like a normal class.

The other key here, in regards to tutoring, is how affordable (and thus in many cases available) tutoring should be to students. I would venture to say that most of the federally funded tutors are tutoring lower income students - but I wonder if these lower income students would "upgrade" to higher priced services if money were not an issue. Furthermore, I wonder if the results of their tests would further improve. We'll never know, at least until affordable tutoring is provided in all the metro areas of the study cited above.

Democratizing Tutoring

Part of what we're trying to do at CK (College Knowledge) is to democratize tutoring. We were inspired by the idea of "democratizing something" after reading about Henry Ford and his Model T. His goal was to make cars available to "any man earning a decent wage" and we felt the same could be done for tutoring.

So our first thought was "why is tutoring so expensive?" We were surprised that the high cost of tutoring didn't arise from tutoring companies paying their tutors more; in many cases, the larger tutoring companies charge exorbitant amounts and pay their tutors anywhere between only 15-25% of the total cost charged to clients. From the beginning, we decided to challenge them by accepting lower profit margins as a company that would result in fairer, higher wages for our wonderful tutors - we pay 50% or more of the final tutoring bill to our tutors.

Another thing we noticed is that the tutoring companies in Atlanta were all charging $50 an hour and up. Why was no one offering a lower price? It seemed like the companies were quietly in agreement that none of them would charge less than $50 an hour in Atlanta. We decided, before even officially starting the company, that we would charge 40% less and so came about our decision to charge $30 an hour.

Even though we save our clients 40% or more on their tutoring costs, our current clients can all tell you that they're very satisfied with CK tutors and that we have not sacrificed quality. Every client we've had so far has signed up for follow-up tutoring sessions; this is further evidence that our handpicked tutors are not only top-notch students but also very good at tutoring and mentoring. Our goal going forward is to keep adding satisfied clients and keep our operations as efficient as possible to pass on huge savings to our customers; we face many choices going forward but know that we will continue to prioritize the right things and won't seek growth just for growth's sake. We welcome any suggestions along the way to continue making CK a success.

Improve Grades / Be More Productive

Improving grades and being more productive are two separate things. You can have good grades and not be productive or vice versa. As such, here are two helpful links to be taken with a grain of salt:

How to improve your grades from WikiHow. This is by no means a definitive answer, but it's a start and I like the basic message to try your hardest and don't be afraid to seek school help if you need it. Oh and has anyone noticed the similarities between WikiHow and Ask.com? I know that WikiHow is collaborative, but the two services otherwise seem the same.

How to be more productive from Wired. This is also not a complete answer, though the main message is that organizing oneself will lead to more productivity. Though this is a commonly held belief, I remember thumbing through A Perfect Mess and thinking Eric and David made some good points which would counter the Wired article I just provided.

A review of A Perfect Mess from Amazon:

Flying utterly in the face of conventional wisdom, the authors turn the world of organization on its head to examine how messy systems can be more effective than highly organized ones. Neatness for its own sake, they say, not only has hidden costs in terms of man-hours that could be spent doing other work but it turns out that the highly touted advantages may not even exist. More loosely defined, moderately disorganized people and businesses seem to be more efficient, more robust, and more creative than the obsessively neat.

Braylon Edwards: $1 Million Donation to Education

Braylon Edwards, wide-receiver for the Cleveland Browns, announced a $1 Million scholarship donation to 100 8th graders in the Cleveland area that will pay for them to go to college. That's $10,000 per lucky student.

The story points out that the funding will also pay for tutoring and mentoring; it's clear that Braylon Edwards and his foundation also "gets it" when it comes to the importance of supplemental education. It's too bad our company is not yet in the Cleveland area, because we'd love to work with his foundation to provide quality, low cost tutoring and mentoring.

I love reading positive stories, especially when athletes give back to their communities.