Toronto high-school student Julian meets up with his tutor, David Laredo, once a week for extra help on his Grade 9 math.
He started last fall, in part because a friend was also signing up and because his parents thought it would supplement his school work. It certainly wasn't because his grades were slipping; he brings home solid As and Bs.
Tutors are no longer just for children flunking out at school. What used to be a remedial fix is now commonplace for good students. In fact, 73 per cent of children being tutored are like Julian, according to recent research by the Canadian Council on Learning.
But with one in three parents now paying for private tutors - with increasingly refined accoutrements such as door-to-door bus services and healthy snacks - tutoring is considered a logical and convenient way to help kids maintain their grades. And to battle the homework juggernaut.
University professor Molly Ladd-Taylor, Julian's mom, says that was one advantage of her son's new regimen.
"I think it's been quite good for him. It keeps him on top of the homework in a positive way with positive reinforcement," she says.
While many parents complain their kids have too much homework, they are inspired to manage it, experts say. Seventy-five per cent of Ontario parents say their children have "somewhat" or "much more" homework than they did as a child, and by the time their kids are in Grade 4, 77 per cent of parents say they're helping out, according to a recent Ontario Institute for Studies in Education report.
Some schools are trying to respond to what many see as a homework crisis. The Toronto District School Board, for instance, is currently conducting its own homework survey of parents, which could affect its homework policy. It plans to look at the results in April. For now, most parents see homework as a necessary evil.
"They're accepting the stress as part of the price of their children's success," says Paul Cappon, president of the Canadian Council on Learning. "But they try to alleviate it. And one of the ways they alleviate it is by bringing in tutors."
In addition to the now-quaint kitchen-table tutor, there are online tutoring services picking up the homework slack, such as Tutor.com, which can be reached for a midnight math query.
But it's the bricks-and-mortar businesses, which charge from $40 to $70 an hour, that are booming - the Kumons, Sylvans and Oxford Learning centres. Oxford, for instance, started with a single location in 1984. Today, there are 85 franchises across the country, 35 in the United States and three abroad.
"Time and time again we get those phone calls you know come straight from the argument at the kitchen table. A lot of times it's the homework wars," says Emma Cecchin, who runs an Oxford Learning franchise in London, Ont.
Since the 1990s, Canadian researchers say businesses such as these have grown by 200 to 500 per cent, depending on the city. They're growing faster than the school-age population, says University of Waterloo sociologist Janice Aurini, who studies private tutoring and upper-middle-class parenting. She calls the growth a "revolution."
"Parents have very high expectations and have a different sense of what remedial means," she says. While Dr. Aurini says most people in the private tutor business are caring and have a desire to do a good job, they are a reflection of today's more intensive forms of childrearing - for good and bad.
Parents who hire tutors are wealthy and educated, and tend to put their children in camps and take them on educational vacations, she says. "Everything's a teachable moment," she says. "Tutoring just becomes part of the repertoire of child-rearing activities parents engage in."
