About a month ago, there were news reports here and there, sounding the alarm on the tutoring industry. The reports appear to have been inspired by the heavy promotion of a weightless paper by some University of Sydney education academics. Better, the reports also referred to the more thoughtful and interesting work of UTS education social scientist, Christina Ho. The alarm and the calls for “regulation” of the tutoring industry were not totally crazy but, as is typical with education coverage, the reports were fundamentally off-key. The obvious and fundamental point was barely touched upon.
God knows how big is the tutoring industry but, largely hidden and very grey, it is obviously huge, much larger than in decades past. There has always been tutoring, of course, to take care of younger kids getting lost on the basics or to optimise results on high stakes senior exams. But it was nothing like it is. Fair enough if people wish to shine a light on the industry, cottage version and Chinese hothouse version and every version in between, to consider the tutoring’s worth and its effects on formal schooling.
There is no question that the prevalence of tutoring exacerbates classroom issues, which was one of the main arguments of the news reports. Plenty of tutoring is focused upon kids who are struggling with their class work, and such tutoring should generally assist teachers, but plenty more tutoring is about getting the kid “ahead”, which is much more a mixed bag. The news reports talk about tutoring moving kids “two years ahead”, which can leave the kid “disengaged” in the classroom and with the teacher floundering, desperately looking for something decent to keep the kid occupied. Teachers are already going nuts with the great disparity in the classroom, which is not helped whatsoever when the HoM or Principal chants “differentiation”, as if it were a magic incantation that will fix everything. Differentiation is a scam, teachers are already going nuts and accelerating tutoring undoubtedly makes this issue much more difficult.
One has to ask, however, why students are being so accelerated. Some of it is simply bad tutoring, with misguided and misguiding tutors getting Year N kids onto simple Year N+2 mechanics, rather than teaching more deeply and more solidly the Year N material; this can screw the kid up no end, who will imagine they understand much more than they do and can then become a recalcitrant dick, refusing to slow down to learn things properly. Most of this accelerating tutoring, however, is at least intrinsically more reasonable in its goals. As the news reports note, the motivations are a mix. Some of it is cultural, with Chinese tiger moms and related species simply expecting mathematics of a different standard at a given age. Some of it is scholarship preparation, with many students competing for entry to fewer selective schools. These motivations have a large overlap, of course. One can be concerned, as Associate Professor Ho is, with the societal drawbacks of this expectation and competition, but that does not contradict the intrinsic motivation and the value for the individual.
For all that, the news reports are ignoring the big fat elephant truth underlying this explosion of tutoring: the schools are screwing up.
Why are parents getting their kids “two years ahead”? Because, more accurately, most school classrooms are at least two years behind any sane standard. Why are parents so desperate to have their kids in selective schools, which require either a zillion dollars in fees or the attainment of a scholarship? Because, more and more, the non-selective schools really suck. It is madness to be railing against the grey tutoring industry when the black and white industry of schooling has so lost its way.
As long as ACARA provides us the Mariana Trench baseline of an utterly appalling curriculum, as long as school principals go all Pontius on what is to be taught when not going loony on inquiry twaddle or the latest technofad, as long as government ministers drown public schools in handcuffing red tape so that even a dedicated teacher is not permitted to spend their actual time teaching and will eventually flee to a private sanctuary, the vast majority of schools will be screwed and any perceptive and sane parent will take action accordingly.
This is not complicated. Simply, our educational leaders have screwed us and continue to screw us. It is madness to focus on parents going elsewhere for a decent education and it is madness to focus on the tutoring industry for providing somewhere else to go.
Nice Title. Get thee to a punnery.
I give good title.
Thanks Gilbert. I missed it.
You have detention. Please stay back after the blog.
The other elephant is students being passed to next year without any real understanding of the current year’s work.
I think that’s a limb of the same elephant.
But when the blind fondle different parts of said elephant…
(Reference to a poem for those playing at home).
Marty, have you had a chance to look at the recent Age article complaining about HSC maths questions? Potentially worth a look, as I personally found the questions to be remarkably straightforward by VCAA standards, so I’m uncertain if it’s a matter of baseless whinging from Sydneysiders or my own perspective having been utterly warped by the wonders of VCE.
Huh. No. I’ll hunt.
Went down a rabbit hole and it looks like NSW has the “show” infection as well.
“Don’t use the answer provided in a “show” question and work backwards. Instead begin with the information provided in the question and demonstrate your method to reach the answer provided.”
https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/how-to-get-your-best-mark-in-hsc-mathematics-20250620-p5m94a.html
Sigh. I’ll look.
Hi, Craig. Well, it’s an advice article rather than NESA gospel, but, yes, it smells like NESA also screws up “show”. I’ll put hammering this crap on the list.
There’s a few articles and I’ll look, but is there a particular article to which you were referring?
It’s this one from last week: https://www.theage.com.au/national/nsw/was-this-the-hardest-hsc-maths-exam-in-recent-history-20251013-p5n26f.html
The longer I look at it, the less I can understand the complaints, especially for those that it’s too “wordy” as it seems brief when compared to VCAA.
Got it. Thanks. Yeah, the expression “cry me a river” comes to mind, but I’ll look carefully and at other articles floating around.
Hi Diogenes. I’ve looked, and looked around. And, yeah, it’s much ado about very good questions. The question and a half in the article were nice, testing questions, and nicely written. One would kill to have such questions south of the border.
I think it may be a case of the reporter Harris trying to create a theme out of nothing. I didn’t get the sense that people were complaining about the questions, simply that the exam was challenging and that the final question was, as designed, really testing and a genuine separator. Which is exactly what you want from such an exam.
I think Harris tried to morph the “wow, that’s hard” comments into complaints, and make it a continuation of complaints about the “wordiness” on a previous exam. But it’s all pretty silly (and Harris tends to have his moments). The report that Harris links to about the “wordy” exam was three years ago. Who knows? Maybe, although I doubt that NESA could do VCA-like wordiness if they tried. Whatever. It was three years ago, and Harris is just filing words for a story, without much thought.
I agree that it seems to be an effort to make something out of nothing for the purpose of milking a cheap story. However, I do take issue with the sentiment given to close that article from a “maths educator” who said:
“I firmly believe the exams are created with the idea that they have to be able to discriminate at the top end between first in state in the very top students. That pressure causes the last couple of questions to be set at a level which is way above the level appropriate for maths advanced. Maths exams should be strengths-based, assessing what students can do rather than trying to find out what they can’t do. When they’ve done a two-year course, you would be able to expect them to be able to demonstrate what they’ve learnt.”
The notion that a year 12 exam that can differentiate between students of different ability is a bad thing is honestly staggering in its idiocy. Would they prefer a paper with a 90% average in which every mark you lose gives your ATAR a serious hit?
Yeah, that is pretty damn stupid.
On the Mathematics Association of NSW facebook page, there was a post from a teacher that complained it was too difficult and should be made easier (i.e. there where not enough “routine” questions). Within a day the post had almost 200 likes. So there is genuine, and possibly broad, dissatisfaction about the test and more generally how “difficult” the tests have been over the last few years in NSW. This is probably, at least in part, what the news reports are picking up on.
Very capable students in my school found the test a challenge. They needed to think carefully about questions more then they expected instead of going into autopilot mode and producing a solution. This, however, is good in my opinion. I did some of the questions with my current year 11’s and we learnt a good deal. The questions illuminated interesting properties and also a variety of approaches. It would be a big shame if the test is dummed down and a huge disservice to students aspiring to be engineers or other technical professions. They would be misled about the rigour of maths expected and set up to fail.
They’re all idiots. Hard tests are much fairer.
Was there not a policy that grade C meant good, B required to be 6 months ahead and A meant the student is 1 year ahead. This last means y6 students knows the stuff from y7 (but is in y6 anyway).
Just imagine PT interview where the teacher praizes the student : “uhmm, very good, excellent. Earned almost always 100% on tests, so deservedly, was awarded C for the subject this semester!”
But ,may be parents want A, which requires studies and knowledge of 1 grade above. Via extra tutoring.
I don’t see any evidence of that. But even if that were being done, it’d be idiotic. Racing a good Year N kid ahead with crap Year N+1 work is just as idiotic as if a tutor is doing it.
There is another aspect to the situation worth noting that applies not only to tutoring but chains of schools (some charter schools for example). This is becoming profit-making investments by funds and corporations, with what all of this implies for the status of the clients and employees, ripe for exploitation. This is a similar phenomenon to what is occurring across the economy (rental apartments, veterinary services, certain medical services, for example). Then it becomes a matter of shaping and responding to the market, rather then what the needs actually are.
Yes, I can see this could be an issue, but at least in Australia I think it is much less a concern than schools’-authorities’ expectations are way too low and way too weird. The tutoring schools are answering a demand, and i may not demand exactly the same thing or answer the given demand in exactly the same way, but at least the better tutoring schools are doing a much better job than the formal school system.
I think it’s leaders at all levels. Heads of Department are often afraid to impose a standard because teacher autonomy.
Really? Are you thinking primary or secondary? I don’t think of many teachers as having particularly high standards, but I thought most teaching was pretty homogenised, with agreed upon exercises and largely lock-step lessons and so forth.
The other issue is that while these tutoring companies accelerate, they do it in a procedural way and often don’t give the conceptual understanding. I can’t see much point in it as they’ll cover the material anyway later but the parents (and probably many of the kids) clearly want the acceleration. Check out the Melbourne Schools Discussion Group on Facebook if you want to see parents obsessing about school choice, tutoring etc. Our society has become much more competitive and this is to some extent, a logical conclusion.
Thanks, JJ. Yes, that’s the accusation but I think the accusation is both less true and less valid than is being suggested.
On the truth: I taught a little at one of the Chinese hothouse schools and I did not get the sense of the kids being overly advanced. In the regular classes, the kids just seemed to be getting harder problems of the proper year level. I guess some of the kids could have been accelerated, but most of the kids in the Year N class appeared to be in Year N. The “scholarship training” classes were different, and were excellent. Not accelerated, just damn hard.
On the validity: That’s a standard ACARA claim, that the curriculum is all about high-level understanding rather than low-level procedure, and the claim is 95% bullshit. None of this conceptual stuff sticks unless the kid is spending the overwhelming percentage of her time on hard and varied exercises, to see what happens to those concepts in the mud of messy reality. This is simply not done in schools. And, if some tutoring schools are over-emphasising procedure and cheap tricks, my sense is that, in sum, the tutoring schools are in effect teaching the concepts better than the schools.
I’m not going to go on Facebook to look at these forums but I can imagine. Parents are worried about schools because most schools suck. And, a point I should have made in the post, parents should also be worried about schools because VCE is so pissweak, i such an appalling measure of ability or proper work, that the way to get into law or medicine is not to excel academically but to play the idiotic VCE game really really well.
Where could one find a collection of hard and varied exercises?
Stay tuned …
Good sources are books by Tony Gardiner; many old text books contain exercises that are varied and hard for students today; Dover has published books of challenging problems by Posamentier; problems from the Australian Mathematics Competition are available online; similarly you can find problems from competitions from different countries that are readily available; over only a few years I have developed a good collection; an interesting mathematics competition in the US is the MATHCOUNTS competition which I found today on youtube.
No, these are almost all off the point.
Have a look here
https://archive.org/details/@mir-titles
Way to go with the pinpoint reference.
Been a while, Marty! Always happy to hear from you, though
Just wanted to say that ‘play[ing] the idiotic VCE game really really well’ is probably part of the test for entering a law (and medicine, to a lesser extent) degree. If you can play the system, you’ll make a perfect lawyer and a very rich private doctor!
On a more related note: I was admonished for trying to ‘accelerate’ a very capable student in year 8 during the topic of area by… getting them to use Pythagoras’ theorem (which is, apparently, a year 9 topic. Should have known!)
I was also told off for teaching a student how to solve simultaneous equations without a CAS. Said student was knocked back from doing Methods once I left that school. I now tutor them privately (another story for another time)
The curriculum is problematic, but there are plenty of administrative twats who treat it like the Bible
Fox, that’s a very funny line about VCE but the truth isn’t whatsoever funny. The truth is that VCE mathematics assessment is screwed as a reliable measure of understanding and ability, and it is absolutely screwed at the top end.
As for the muppets telling you off for trying to teach mathematics, sure. The vast majority of teachers and HoMs have drunk the snake oil and have bought into the appalling standards.
Couldn’t read the first report; it is behind the paywall. However, the second report is an utter rubbish, unfiltered dump of the subconscious.
Jesus Mike. There’s lots of links. Don’t be so sloppy. This is a blog but don’t just rant.