SINGAPORE — On the second floor of a Singapore shopping center, five boys and two girls sat in a small room with the blinds drawn, a whiteboard the only object on the lime-green walls. Jordan Goh, 12, who began receiving after-school tutoring two years ago, went up to the board to answer a math problem about [...]

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Tutoring spreads beyond Asia’s wealthy

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SINGAPORE — On the second floor of a Singapore shopping center, five boys and two girls sat in a small room with the blinds drawn, a whiteboard the only object on the lime-green walls.

Jordan Goh, 12, who began receiving after-school tutoring two years ago, went up to the board to answer a math problem about time and distance, while Dr. Zhong Rui Wen, the founder of the Raffles EduHub, a tutoring center, gave pointers from the back of the room.
“This place, it has been helping me a lot,” said Jordan, who attends the center three afternoons a week. “It drills me on stuff that I don’t understand.”

Every week, about 150 children attend this center, just a handful of the many students taking private tutoring across Singapore, where attending extra lessons after school has become the norm.

Once the domain of the elite, private tutoring has become widespread across Asia, according to a report released in July by the Asian Development Bank and the Comparative Education Research Center at the University of Hong Kong.

The report quoted studies, polls and other sources as saying that 97 percent of all Singaporean students, nearly 90 percent of South Korean primary students and about 85 percent of Hong Kong senior secondary students receive tutoring.

Perhaps more surprising is the prevalence of tutoring in poorer countries. According to various studies, 60 percent of primary students in the Indian state of West Bengal receive tutoring, while a similar proportion of senior secondary students in Kazakhstan attend extra lessons.

Researchers say that private tutoring, which they call “shadow education,” can help students academically, but they also found that the quality of instruction varied substantially.

The number of Asian parents spending heavily on extra lessons has increased, according to the report, “Shadow Education: Private Supplementary Tutoring and Its Implications for Policy Makers in Asia.”

“It is becoming a pan-Asian phenomenon and indeed a global phenomenon,” Mark Bray, an author of the report and the director of the Comparative Education Research Center at the University of Hong Kong, said by telephone.

Many Asian families devote vast sums to supplement government education. “The most dramatic number is Korea,” said Mr. Bray, who is also a professor of comparative education at the University of Hong Kong, “where households are spending the equivalent of 80 percent of what the government is spending.” The report said that for students in government secondary schools in Bangladesh, an average of 41.9 percent of the total household cost of education was spent on private tutoring.

Tutoring can range from one-on-one sessions taught by neighbors or older students to classes at franchised centers, as well as over the Internet.

The report also described how “star tutors” who can fill lecture halls have become a phenomenon in places like Hong Kong.

It cited two South Korean celebrity tutors: Woo Hyeong-cheol, who reportedly earns $3.9 million per year offering Web-based math classes to 50,000 students; and Rose Lee, “the Queen of English,” said to earn $6.8 million per year, also through online classes.

Mr. Bray said increased job competition was one of several causes for the rise in demand.

“One of the major factors is globalization, that families are no longer competing with their own neighborhood — they’re competing with the region and the world,” he said.

In some poorer countries, like Cambodia, perceived weaknesses in the school system could also prompt parents to turn to tutoring, Mr. Bray said.

Teachers in Hong Kong and Singapore are not permitted to tutor their own students privately for additional pay. But teachers in other countries who do so for extra income may also be bolstering demand.

Pakistan, where 60 percent of the population lives on less than $2 per day, is example of a developing country where demand for tutoring has spread beyond wealthier, urban centers.

In the rural part of Lahore, 44 percent of private school students and 32 percent of government school students had private tutoring last year, according to the Annual Status of Education Report, a survey conducted by Idara-e-Taleem- o-Aagahi, or the Center for Education and Consciousness, on behalf of the South Asian Forum for Education Development. In the urban area of Lahore, that number rises to 60 percent.

“It can be said that the incidence of private tutoring is lower in relatively poorer areas,” Baela Raza Jamil, the director of programs at Idara-e-Taleem-o-Aagahi, said by e-mail. “However, it is definitely no more a phenomena limited to the wealthier families of the country.”

Over all, 24 percent of Pakistani students who attended private schools reported taking supplementary tutoring last year, while the figure was 7 percent among government school students.

“Because of the increased competition for higher learning outcomes,” Ms. Jamil said, parents who can afford it are providing supplementary tutoring for their children.

The Federally Administered Tribal Areas had the highest level of private tutoring in Pakistan, with almost half of private school students and a quarter of government school students receiving tutoring, a rate Ms. Jamil attributed to the fact those schools often close because of conflicts along the Afghan-Pakistan border.

The report found that tutoring could worsen social inequalities, cause stress for families and reduce the time students spent on other activities.

A recent letter in The Straits Times, the biggest newspaper in Singapore, said that many parents wanted a more balanced education for their children and that social mobility might be affected by the heavy reliance on extra tutoring, also known as “tuition.”
“How can we tell ourselves that all students stand an equal chance of moving up the social ladder when success in our education system is highly dependent on the extra tuition and enrichment lessons that wealthier parents can afford and poorer parents cannot?” read the letter, by Wily Wan.

Researchers say they are also worried about the impact tutoring is having on formal education.

“Even in societies where teachers are not allowed to tutor their own students,” Mr. Bray said, “if teachers think there is a safety net, they may be less concerned about working hard, about doing what arguably should be their job of helping children, of making sure the children understand and so on.”

The researchers recommended that governments more closely monitor the tutoring industry and consider possible regulations. The report also suggests that policy makers look at improving mainstream education to make supplementary tutoring less desirable.
But it seems as if many parents in Asia still feel that tutoring is necessary.

Dr. Zhong, a medical doctor and child psychiatrist, said her tutoring center in Singapore was only for students whose grades are average or below average — children who she said often required more attention than they received in school. She says she believes that students can combine tutoring with other activities and that she does not want her students to neglect pursuits like sports.
Jordan Goh’s mother, Judy Hii, sent him to the center to help him with the primary school final exam, which will determine which secondary school he attends.

“Because of the limited time the teacher has with them, they really do need help,” Ms. Hii said. “The school will say, ‘Leave it to the school,’ but somehow it’s just not enough.”

She thinks that the extra lessons have paid off because Jordan passed his last mock exam after 10 days of intensive drilling at the center.
Referring to Dr. Zhong, Ms. Hii said, “She did some miracle work.”-nytimes.com

Caption: Natasha Christopher teaching a class at the Raffles EduHub center. The organization was founded by Dr. Zhong Rui Wen, who is seated at rear.




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