How do you make sure the money you’re spending with tutoring is benefiting your child?

While tutors once focused on helping children who were falling behind in particular subjects or had a learning disability, they are now being used far more to guide students through particularly tough courses, insure their grades are equal to or above their peers’ and, in the end, polish a child’s college application.

Parents who once would have had in-home tutors are going to tutoring centers, while some using the centers have cut back on hours or moved to online-only platforms. Let's look at tutoring from an investment point of view. Is there any way to measure what parents and children are getting for all this money? What can a tutor reasonably be expected to do? Is this money well spent? But the bigger question that springs from this is, How do you make sure the money you’re spending is benefiting your child?

Helping children improve in areas where they are struggling is clearly important.  Any tutoring should bolster standardized test scores.  Expectations should modest. You’re not going to go from a 550 to an 800 on the SAT, but you can count on a 100-point rise. A lot of that is just getting your child used to taking the test.

Unfortunately parents and administrators have become obsessed with standardizing test.  In fact I believe, this has reached its absurd extreme at times.  School competition is clearly part of parents’ thinking, but it’s not just for college. “Parents are concerned about how their children rank against their friends, their neighbors, kids in the next town over, the next state over ...

On the positive side, for children, tutors can often comfort them and let them talk to someone beyond their parents. They can say what they want and that person will translate it to Mom and Dad. That’s what the kid needs because they’re afraid of letting Mom and Dad down.

This therapeutic value is one good use of the money, but so, too, is how it can make a child feel about school.  Remember test preparations has some importance, but more qualitative measures of success are things like attitude, self-confidence and the willingness to finish homework. Parents appreciate when kids can get their homework done without Mom hovering over them.