Kristi St. Charles is losing her voice. It’s past 10 p.m. on a Sunday, and she’s been working since 2 p.m. She didn’t expect it to be a long day; she was only supposed to work four hours. “It wasn’t what I originally anticipated,” the Weinberg senior says of her two-year job tutoring three North Shore children.
What started out as 10 hours a week to help cover laundry quickly turned into 30 at her employer’s beck and call. “The mom wants them to get good grades on everything, so she expects me to make sure everything on the homework assignment is 100 percent correct,” St. Charles says. Now, she finds herself at the family’s dinner table up to six days out of seven. “A paper has to be an ‘A’ paper,” she says.
Perfectionism isn’t a bad thing, says Kathryn Hirsh-Pasek, author of Einstein Never Used Flash Cards: How Our Children Really Learn and Why They Need to Play More and Memorize Less. The problem is when students aren’t succeeding for themselves. “I think what we’re witnessing is a new way of parenting, where parents are CEO, and there’s almost a managerial way of how we want to approach our children,” she says. The added pressure is due to “baby boomlet” demographics, says Hirsh-Pasek, who is also head of the infant language laboratory at Temple University. “There are (only a) few spaces, and there are more children competing for those spaces,” she says. “When you add that with the fears that come with a global society and a global economy … parents are struggling to try to make sure their children have all the best opportunities in the world.”
Every year, Jim Conroy, head of the guidance department at New Trier Township High School in Winnetka, Ill., sees the same thing: about a thousand pairs of freshman parents demanding he get their children into an elite university. The phone calls usually sound something like, “Call Billy in and tell him he’s not studying correctly and won’t get good grades and won’t get into a ‘good school,’ ” he says. “It’s the phrase they use all the time.”
Whether it’s Conroy’s doing or not, the district parents are getting their way. New Trier is the No. 1 feeder to the Big Ten in the country and the class of 2008 boasts an average ACT score of 27.1 – the highest in Illinois. Of the senior class, 95 percent will go on to a four-year university. But the school’s reputation appears to be self-perpetuating, Conroy says. When students decide where to send their 22 college applications – the average for a New Trier senior – counselors advise them not to rule out places like a small liberal arts school in Maine, he says. It’s usually to no avail. “You’re playing the status game which is ‘what’s the most prestigious school I can get into’ – not ‘what’s the best fit for me’ ” he says. “That’s not right.”
This atmosphere is at least partially bred by the structure of high school courses. As with most schools, New Trier offers different classes at varying difficulty levels. According to Conroy, the prevailing wisdom for parents seems to be “move your kid up a level and hire a tutor.” The counselor estimates anywhere from a quarter to a third of the student body enlists the help of at least one tutor for everything from an English paper to SAT prep.
That’s why local parents seek tutors who they feel know how to get into an elite school: Northwestern students. In Glencoe, St. Charles divides her weeks between the family’s three boys – a fourth-grader, a seventh-grader and a freshman at New Trier. Her pupils spend their time on anything but homework, she says. All three are heavily involved in hockey and baseball, with daily practices and weekend games. “They don’t do anything on their own, so they don’t do any homework they have in class or study hall,” St. Charles says. “They bring it home, and then I help them with it.” It might make sense for the youngest student, who she says is behind in reading and math and gets help from other tutors as well. But for students like the freshman, who St. Charles says would be a ” ‘B’ student” without her, it might just enable laziness. “The kids use it as a crutch so they don’t have to work as hard on their own,” she says.
But that doesn’t mean it’s their fault. After all, it’s the parents who are paying the tutors. To find them, Conroy says they often use lists of willing college students kept by New Trier departments or word of mouth. St. Charles inherited her $15-an-hour job from a graduating friend.
For Weinberg sophomore Saagar Kulkarni, it’s a prime business opportunity. The economics major is president of NU Tutors, a student-run company that hopes to break into the local tutor market starting this fall. His idea is partially funded by a student group, Northwestern Student Holdings, which helps brainstorm and launch new businesses. Kulkarni admits tutors can quickly become “crutches,” but he says they can still offer a lot. “They might be doing it just to get into the better school, but getting smarter and looking at things differently is never bad,” he says.
That’s debatable, Hirsh-Pasek says. When we spoke, she was on her way back from a conference where professionals discussed the importance of play. The consensus was that it not only teaches kids to look at things in new ways, but helps them problem-solve and think creatively. As the author discusses in her book, kids never learn these skills if parents overbook their children’s free time. The same applies to overburdened teenagers. “Parents are so worried about never having their child fail that they over-tutor, write papers for their kids and work too much on essays – all in efforts to better position their children,” she says. “But we know that, at the end of the day, the children that will be independent are the ones that have had an opportunity not only to succeed, but to succeed on their own.”
And while college acceptance is the endgame of the parents’ zeal, the effects of such meddling are also reappearing postgraduation, the author says. “Business leaders are very upset with the current graduates because they cannot solve anything for themselves,” she says. “They’re very good at filling the blanks and doing the job, but if it gets creative and they need a new solution, these children are not equipped to do it.” Sometimes they can barely do that. One tutor, whose name is withheld for job security, says it’s not uncommon for the parents to ask for homework answers to be written out on a separate piece of paper if the kids aren’t home. “There are times I’ve done entire assignments because the kids won’t work and the mom wants it done properly,” the tutor says. And although students’ dream schools may not know the difference, that doesn’t mean the kids will be better off. Upon hearing the tutor’s story, Conroy says he is “disturbed” by the practice, but adds students’ learning skills will suffer regardless of who writes the answers on the worksheet. “If you’re a high school senior, and you can’t force yourself to structure your time, that’s not a good thing,” he says.
Still, both St. Charles and experts interviewed agree that tutoring can be extremely useful if used correctly. Even Hirsh-Pasek hired a tutor for her son, a high school senior. It’s all about striking a balance, she says. If papers were edited, her son had to make changes in his own voice. When prepping for the SAT, she had the tutor focus on comprehension skills rather than tricks for answering cookie-cutter reading comprehension questions. “As a mom and a psychologist, I totally understand why none of us want our kids to fail and I’ll do everything I possibly can to help my children,” she says. “On the other hand, I won’t do it for them.”
Weinberg sophomore Declan Taintor is trying to strike a similar balance with a New Trier student he’s tutoring. Northwestern’s English department sent out a message on its e-mail list earlier this year looking for an English major to help a high school freshman whom Taintor describes as a “math-science kid with math-science parents.” Taintor spends four hours a week helping with worksheets, papers
and the mysteries of Shakespeare. According to Taintor, the boy used to be failing English. “I feel like he really tries,” he says. “But it’s frustrating. He still doesn’t know what a simile or metaphor is.”
In the meantime, college admission standards continue to rise. Northwestern’s 25th-percentile combined math and critical reading SAT score has steadily risen from 1290 to 1320 since the 2000-01 school year, and high school seniors’ résumés are listing more and more extracurricular activities, says Dean of Undergraduate Admissions Christopher Watson. “The number of kids who are applying to school is rising, but our enrollment is staying the same,” Watson says. “The perception is that it is harder to get into schools like Northwestern than it was five, 10, 15 years ago.”
Meanwhile, St. Charles is just waiting for June. Graduation means the end of her tutoring career and a summer internship before she starts law school this fall.
She’s never used a tutor.
