Posted on 09/28/2006 12:40:44 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
BOSTON, Sept 28 (Reuters) - Private tutors are a luxury many American families cannot afford, costing anywhere between $25 to $100 an hour. But California mother Denise Robison found one online for $2.50 an hour -- in India.
"It's made the biggest difference. My daughter is literally at the top of every single one of her classes and she has never done that before," said Robison, a single mother from Modesto.
Her 13-year-old daughter, Taylor, is one of 1,100 Americans enrolled in Bangalore-based TutorVista, which launched U.S. services last November with a staff of 150 "e-tutors" mostly in India with a fee of $100 a month for unlimited hours.
Taylor took two-hour sessions each day for five days a week in math and English -- a cost that tallies to $2.50 an hour, a fraction of the $40 an hour charged by U.S.-based online tutors such as market leader Tutor.com that draw on North American teachers, or the usual $100 an hour for face-to-face sessions.
"I like to tell people I did private tutoring every day for the cost of a fast-food meal or a Starbucks' coffee," Robison said. "We did our own form of summer school all summer."
The outsourcing trend that fueled a boom in Asian call centers staffed by educated, low-paid workers manning phones around the clock for U.S. banks and other industries is moving fast into an area at the heart of U.S. culture: education.
It comes at a difficult time for the U.S. education system: only two-thirds of teenagers graduate from high school, a proportion that slides to 50 percent for black Americans and Hispanics, according to government statistics.
China and India, meanwhile, are producing the world's largest number of science and engineering graduates -- at least five times as many as in the United States, where the number has fallen since the early 1980s.
Parents using schools like Taylor's say they are doing whatever they can to give children an edge that can lead to better marks, better colleges and a better future, even if it comes with an Indian accent about 9,000 miles (14,500 km) away.
SLANG & AMERICAN ACCENTS
"We've changed the paradigm of tutoring," said Krishnan Ganesh, founder and chairman of TutorVista, which offers subjects ranging from grammar to geometry for children as young as 6 years old to adults in college.
"It's not that the U.S. education system is not good. It's just that it's impossible to give personalized education at an affordable cost unless you use technology, unless you use the Internet and unless you can use lower-cost job centers like India," he said over a crackly Internet-phone line from Bangalore. "We can deliver that."
Many of the tutors have masters degrees in their subjects, said Ganesh. On average, they have taught for 10 years. Each undergoes 60 hours of training, including lessons on how to speak in a U.S. accent and how to decipher American slang.
They are schooled on U.S. history and state curricula, and work in mini-call centers or from their homes across India. One operates out of Hong Kong, teaching the Chinese language.
As with other Indian e-tutoring firms such as Growing Stars Inc., students log on to TutorVista's Web site and are assigned lessons by tutors who communicate using voice-over-Internet technology and an instant messaging window. They share a simulated whiteboard on their computers.
Denise Robison said Taylor had trouble understanding her tutor's accent at first. "Now that she is used to it, it doesn't bother her at all," she said.
TutorVista launched a British service in August and Ganesh said he plans to expand into China in December to tap demand for English lessons from China's booming middle class. In 2007, he plans to launch Spanish-language lessons and build on Chinese and French lessons already offered.
A New Delhi tutoring company, Educomp Solutions Ltd. (EDSO.BO: Quote, Profile, Research), estimates the U.S. tutoring market at $8 billion and growing. Online companies, both from the United States and India, are looking to tap millions of dollars available to firms under the U.S. No Child Left Behind Act for remedial tutoring.
Teachers unions hope to stop that from happening.
"Tutoring providers must keep in frequent touch with not only parents but classroom teachers and we believe there is greater difficulty in an offshore tutor doing that," said Nancy Van Meter, a director at the American Federation of Teachers.
But No Child Left Behind, a signature Bush administration policy, encourages competition among tutoring agencies and leaves the door open for offshore tutors, said Diane Stark Rentner of the Center on Education Policy in Washington.
"The big test is whether the kids are actually learning. Until you answer that, I don't know if you can pass judgment on whether this is a good or bad way to go," she said.
Pretty cool!
"Each undergoes 60 hours of training, including lessons on how to speak in a U.S. accent and how to decipher American slang."
I'd pay to here a young Indian woman with a Hindu/South Alabama accent :)
Translation: We don't care how bad the kids are doing, just shut up and hand us the money.
just teaching the children that American's won't teach
Nachhilfe ping
There's juuuuust ONE CATCH:
It's CHANGING HANDS...!
I'm sure they are. Hopefully they can be distracted by that battle long enough for many school districts and their voters to realize that they can slash their taxes AND deliver better education by outsourcing the ENTIRE job of teaching to companies like this.
Really. How long before one of these Asian companies figures out where the big money is, and starts making school districts offers they can't refuse. A few big ads in the local newspapers in areas where big property tax hikes to fund the public schools are generating widespread voter anger, and the voters will get rid of whoever they need to get rid of in order to effect the change.
Oh, the glories of the public sector!
Hey, can we outsource the War on Poverty to.....Poverty MERCS...?
Uh oh
next thing you know they'll be offering it thru Wal-Mart
:-)
They'll have learning-centers with Starbucks amenities in Wal-Mart, with satellite-hookup to Bangalore, and Carl Rove will be the cackling door greeter...!
"Oh, dear me, my slurpee is leaking...! Did you want to AXE me a question...?!"
WalMart!!!! Living wage!
This is an inevitable development in the transformation of education in the digital age.
This will do to public schools what the Internet did to Dan Rather and the NYTimes.
Our current 20th century industrial age progressive model of education delivery is unsustainable, a dinosaur waiting to die.
Whether public education collapses in a crisis, or whether it is able to transform its value proposition in the education marketplace, will depend how willing our government is to encourage the kind of privatization, flexibility and innovation that this article describes.
Of course, the entrenched public education bureaucracy, including the unions and the Democrat Party, will do everything it can to frustrate this inevitable transformation.
So I fear that the public education system will soon face its own General Motors moment. The choices that will be forced by the consumer market and advancing in content delivery technology and infrastructure will be very painful for a lot of people.
But one way or another, our current public education delivery model is going to end up on the ash heap of history. I'm predicting that this crisis will come withing five years.
Naturally.
Each undergoes 60 hours of training, including lessons on how to speak in a U.S. accent and how to decipher American slang.
Why can't they do that for tech support?
ping
Ridiculous. The Educator's unionists sound dumber and dumber every time they speak.
There's a lot more money in tutoring.
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