Free Republic

When Andrea Starlin first started noticing her sons struggling in high school, her first instinct as a mom was to try to help. "I think the most defeating thing is a lot of times, these are gaps I can't solve because I'm not a teacher. I'm not a mathematician," the Denver-area mom said. To help fill those academic gaps, Starlin has relied on private tutors to help her kids overcome academic hurdles. Lately, though, it's been nearly impossible to find a tutor when she needs one. And Starlin isn't alone, as there is a massive shortage of tutors nationwide

If you had any doubt that hard-left ideologues run government school systems in many (most?) places, take a look at Fairfax County, Virginia's most populous county, with over a million residents, one of the richest counties in the United States with an average household income well over one hundred thousand dollars. The educrats who run the Fairfax public schools have advised parents there not to hire tutors or organize informal homeschool "pods" to replace the shuttered schools because some parents cannot afford to do so, and that would be "unfair." Fairfax County (map credit: Home By School). I am...

Kim Ki-hoon earns $4 million a year in South Korea, where he is known as a rock-star teacher—a combination of words not typically heard in the rest of the world. Mr. Kim has been teaching for over 20 years, all of them in the country's private, after-school tutoring academies, known as hagwons. Unlike most teachers across the globe, he is paid according to the demand for his skills—and he is in high demand. Mr. Kim works about 60 hours a week teaching English, although he spends only three of those hours giving lectures. His classes are recorded on video, and...

BEIJING - Tanya Davis fled Jizhou No. 1 Middle School one winter morning in March before the sun rose over the surrounding cotton fields covered with stubble from last fall's crop. ADVERTISEMENT In the nine months Davis and her boyfriend had taught English at the school in rural north China, they had endured extra work hours, unpaid salaries and frigid temperatures without heating and, on many days, electricity. Hearts pounding and worried their employer would find a pretext to stop them leaving, the couple lugged their backpacks, suitcase, books and guitar past a sleeping guard and into a taxi. As...

Propelled by the No Child Left Behind law, the federally financed tutoring industry has doubled in size in each of the last two years, with the potential to become a $2 billion-a-year enterprise, market analysts say. Tutors are paid as much as $1,997 per child, and companies eager to get a piece of the lucrative business have offered parents computers and gift certificates as inducements to sign up, provided tutors that in some cases are still in high school, and at times made promises they cannot deliver. This new brand of tutoring is offered to parents by private companies and...

The failure of some American students to master math is adding up to big bucks for tutoring companies in India. A little-known provision in the federal No Child Left Behind law allows federal taxpayer dollars to flow to online tutoring services several time zones away in places such as New Delhi and Calcutta. Those services typically contract with U.S. tutoring companies, which provide them the computer software and set the lesson plan. Advertisement Few would begrudge using public money to give struggling students extra help. But some U.S. teachers decry the offering of instruction to Indian firms that pay full-time,...

Terror tutors revive threat from Taliban By Massoud Ansari in Chaman, Pakistan (Filed: 27/07/2003) A week after he left the lawless Kandhar province in Afghanistan, Mir Jan, a terrorist trainer, was impatient to return. Eager pupils awaited: a new generation of Taliban recruits who are taught how to fight American troops and turn themselves into human bombs. To avoid detection, Jan is constantly on the move, travelling from village to village and back across the border with Pakistan, but always plotting his return. He holds classes in explosives, hands out maps of American bases and tells the young volunteers how...