Teaching the Three Rs for Profit

By Ezra Bowen.

An ad in a New Jersey newspaper asks, IS YOUR CHILD CAUGHT IN A FAILURE CHAIN? Another in California urges, GIVE YOUR KIDS AN UNFAIR ADVANTAGE. Both pitches are aimed at the same customers: parents with the cash and the desire to bring a lagging schoolchild up to speed or to put a bright youngster ahead of his classmates. In the past few years such appeals have been pulling thousands of pupils (including a smattering of adults) into private, for- profit learning chains, which are spreading across the country.

The Reading Game first plunged into multi-outlet tutoring in 1970, beginning with eleven centers in California and expanding to 70 in six states. The company has served a principal diet of reading for kindergarten through twelfth grade, both remedial for slow learners and enrichment for fast-track youngsters. Its fee: $20-$25 an hour.

Sylvan Learning Corp. opened its first teaching store in suburban Portland in 1979. Mainly through aggressive franchising, it quickly surpassed Reading Game in size, and now has 211 franchised centers and nine company-owned facilities in 39 states. At an average cost of $25 an hour, Sylvan provides help primarily in reading and math at all grade levels.

Huntington Learning Centers, Inc., smallest of these operations, has been in business since 1977. It owns 13 teaching marts, in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and New York, and has sold franchises for 37 more in eleven states. It charges $19-$22 an hour for remedial reading and math and offers coaching for the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) to college-bound students, a service its rivals are taking up.

All three firms hire only certified teachers, many of them moonlighting at about $6-$10 an hour; and none permits a pupil-to-teacher ratio of more than 3 to 1. "We're doing all the things the schools would do if they could afford it," says Paula Singer, a vice president at Reading Game. Public school people agree. "There's no way public schools can match the attention given to just three students at a time," says Joseph Condon, assistant superintendent of the Ocean View school district in Huntington Beach, Calif., where Reading Game has its headquarters. "I don't hesitate to refer parents to Reading Game."

At the quaint, residential-style Huntington center in River Edge, N.J., Eric Strovinsky, 9, seems very much O.K. today. On the verge last spring of being held back in second grade, Eric has been coming twice a week for 90-minute sessions in math and phonics since August. "He just wasn't keeping up in class," says his mother Donna. Now, however, his grades have climbed from Cs to Bs, and, says Donna proudly, "he gets his homework done. He has the discipline to do it by himself."

At the Sylvan center in Walnut Creek, Calif., Aaron Ruiz, 8, frowns before an audiovisual machine. Like many other youngsters, Aaron has had learning problems: his school wanted to put him into special-education classes, but his mother brought him to Sylvan. A teacher shows Aaron flash cards that say HUG, LUG. He misreads the first word as bug, then catches his mistake. When he corrects it and completes the test successfully, the teacher rewards him with four yellow tokens. These can be exchanged at the "Sylvan store," where pupils trade their accumulated tokens for such goodies as Super GoBots, giant sunglasses and even Walkmans.

A Reading Game center in San Francisco dangles the same kinds of knicknacks as rewards, but Eighth-Grader Andrew Morris seeks a bigger prize. He hopes to boost his test scores so he can apply to a prestigious high school. In English, he has climbed from B to A. Equally important, he says, "it's helped me to feel more confident."

The tab for such results can be steep. Reading Game generally teaches pupils for 48 hours, costing a total of about $1,000. Sylvan recommends 36-hour blocks ($900); Huntington averages roughly 120 hours ($2,600). Says Nell P. Eurich, a trustee of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and an expert on remedial training: "My only concern is that so few people can afford this type of program." Yet there has been no shortage of applicants to the centers ever since Reading Game Founder and President Kenneth Martyn opened his first one in Huntington Beach 16 years ago. Martyn, a former professor of special education at California State University at Los Angeles, became intrigued by the possibility of tutorial centers after doing a study in the '60s on California's public schools.

Citing a need for quality control, Martyn has only seven Reading Game centers under franchise. "It's not like selling hamburgers," he says. His competition, by contrast, has gone predominantly into franchises, and all three companies are offering or moving into subjects such as writing, speed writing and algebra. The cost of setting up a franchise with Sylvan or Huntington is around $50,000 to $100,000, depending on size. The typical licensee is a businessman; Huntington Founder Ray Huntington was a business analyst for AT&T. Sylvan's president Berry Fowler, however, was a junior high art teacher until he switched to tutoring at one of the early Reading Game centers, then jumped ship to form his own organization.

The teaching centers seem one of those ideas that please just about everybody, including businessmen: last year Sylvan was taken over by a child- care conglomerate called Kinder-Care Learning Centers, Inc. for $5.2 million in stock (some $3 million for Fowler). And Encyclopedia Britannica absorbed Reading Game for an undisclosed price. Huntington remains independent, its owner ebullient about the future of teaching for profit. "It's an American response to an academic problem," he says. "You can solve this problem and make money too."

With reporting by Robert Buderi/San Francisco and Lucy Schulte/New York