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... Kumon was founded in 1954 by Toru Kumon, a Japanese high school math teacher who developed study materials for his own struggling son. He believed that kids needed to have a strong foundation in the basics—phonetic awareness and those memorized multiplication tables, for starters—before they could excel at a more advanced level. The curriculum consists of more than 20 defined skill levels for math and reading. New students take a free placement test, get started at a skill level below their current abilities, and move up in small increments. In order for students to advance, they must achieve a...

Watered down by fuzzy math, "whole language" reading and feel-good grading, public school instruction isn't what it used to be. Therein lies a great profitmaking opportunity: Supply the education that schools don't. Kumon, a Japanese firm that has been selling afterschool tutoring in its home country for half a century, broke into the U.S. market in 1983 and finds no shortage of customers here. Kumon now has 1,300 centers and 194,000 students in the U.S., double its enrollment in 2001. That puts it well ahead of its two main competitors, SylvanLearning and Huntington Learning Center. Most Kumon students are between...

To test your diversity acumen and math skills, please read the following 10 names and calculate the percentage of the names that have something in common. (Note: Recent public school graduates will be better at the diversity part of the quiz than the math part.) Julian Gau John David Strickland Aniket Ketkar Sreyas Chintapalli Carl Lian Neil Gurram Oliver Fang Marcele Januta Kent Huynh Alex Xu If you determined that 80 percent are Asian names, you are partially correct. The rest of the answer is that 100 percent are American students from grades one through 10 who won the Kumon...