Almost every weekday, book-toting children spill from a procession of minivans pulling up to an office building in the heart of Columbia. School has been out for hours, but not for pupils at this bustling Sylvan Learning Center.

Similar scenes are repeated across Maryland and the country at thousands of for-profit tutoring sites, from high-achieving Howard County to inner-city Baltimore.

Locally and nationally, a rapidly growing number of parents are seeking the help of private tutors for their children, mainly in reading and other basic skills.

At the core of the trend is insufficient classroom time spent practicing and reinforcing such fundamental skills as phonics and calculating, experts say, coupled with parents' rising aspirations and dwindling trust of schools.

Conservative estimates place the size of the tutoring industry -- which has begun to make inroads into public schools in the Baltimore area and beyond -- in the range of $1 billion a year.

Players range from an untold number of occasional, home-based tutors to such international franchises as Baltimore's Sylvan Learning System Inc. Driving the trend are thousands of parents across the country paying $45 perhour or more, depending on the type of tutoring.

The rapid growth of this industry "talks to what the schools aren't teaching," says Susan Rapp, director of the Village Reading Center in Columbia and a "Reading by 9" consultant to The Sun. "There isn't time to do the practice of the basic skills."

Adds Keith Gay, an education industry analyst for NationsBanc Montgomery Securities in San Francisco: "The key driver of the outside tutoring industry is parents' concern that their children are not getting what they need when they go to their local public school. Their greatest fear is that their child isn't going to get educated in a knowledge economy."

'I want the best'

Zina Fatemi of Columbia is among the concerned parents. "I want the best for my children," she says. "The higher level of education you receive, the better your chances for having a career."

Fatemi sought Sylvan when her 13-year-old daughter, Christina,

hit an academic wall in seventh grade. She was close to failing English and was failing math.

A student at Columbia's Owen Brown Middle School, Christina felt crowded out by other students in her classes and overlooked by her teachers. "The classrooms are so big, so the teacher can't come stand next to you and help you," she says. "In sixth grade, my teacher went over things so fast, and I never understood them. I think I missed everything."

Big chunks of her homework weren't getting done. "I wouldn't do it," she says. "I would get so mad because I didn't know how to do it. I just blew it off."

Fatemi took Christina to the Columbia Sylvan Center for a $200 battery of tests that showed she had not mastered phonics, how to sound out written words. Christina then began small-group tutoring for three hours a week, for which Fatemi pays $480 a month.

After a few months, Christina's grades rose from a C to a B in English and from an E -- considered failing -- to a C in math. Her social studies grade rose from a D to an A.

"I felt better about school, and I liked it," Christina says of (P classes after Sylvan. "When you understand something, you want to do it. Now I'm like, 'Oh, I can do this. It's easy.' "

Fatemi is pleased but remains stunned by how little of basic skills many of today's students are absorbing. "Howard County has really great public schools, but there's no way my daughter should have passed to the eighth grade," she says. "If I couldn't have afforded to send her to Sylvan, I would have held her back."

These days, tutoring isn't only for students falling behind. Remediation is the bulk of their work, but tutors are seeing more students for accelerated work.

John Occhipinti, branch manager for the Washington region of Kumon Math & Reading Centers, based in Teaneck, N.J., estimates that a third of the 2,500 students at its franchises in the mid-Atlantic region come for accelerated purposes.

'The desirable thing to do'

"Tutoring is becoming sort of the desirable thing to do. Now it's more of a status symbol," says Margaret Garroway, president of the Tutoring Association of Maryland and coordinator of Howard Community College's Learning Assistance Center.

In this region, Kumon enrollment has tripled since 1992, Occhipinti says. Kumon has about 1,400 centers in the U.S. and Canada.

Another national tutoring chain, Huntington Learning Centers, based in Oradell, N.J., and founded in 1977, has grown from 90 centers to about 200 in the past five years, serving some 10,000 students annually.

"We've really seen an explosion," says Al Prior, marketing director for Huntington.

But by far, the dominant and fastest-growing player in the tutoring business is Sylvan, whose sleek new headquarters on the waterfront near Fells Point is a monument to needs unmet by schools.

Founded in Portland, Ore., almost 20 years ago, Sylvan has about 700 franchises in the United States, Canada and Asia and has served more than a million children -- 124,000 last year. From 1995 to 1997, Sylvan's revenue doubled from $111 million to $246 million. Since 1993, when the company went public, Sylvan's stock has ballooned in value roughly 500 percent -- and analysts see little end to its prospects.

"As long as the schools aren't performing -- and we don't see any immediate fixes on the horizon -- Sylvan's going to be able to tap into a growing market," says Gay of NationsBanc Montgomery Securities.

Sylvan's formula is evident at its Columbia outlet, which serves about 180 students in a big, open classroom filled with U-shaped tables. At each, a tutor works with three students on different lessons at the same time.

There's also "The Sylvan Store" -- rows of Pez dispensers, plush animals, stickers and sunglasses that the children can buy with earned tokens. Rewards are big in the tutoring business particularly for younger children.

Caroline Shearer of Catonsville started bringing her sons, Brad, 13, and Nathan, 12, to Sylvan last summer for six hours a week. She was so dedicated that she shuttled them to Sylvan by cab several times.

Though Brad had been receiving good grades at St. Mark Catholic School in Catonsville, Sylvan's tests showed a weakness in reading -- something his parents had suspected.

"You are supposed to be able to read a certain amount of words in a certain amount of time," says Shearer. "He was reading much slower and not getting out of it as many key points as he should."

Tutoring "is a way parents can take control and take a stand," Shearer says.

Shearer echoes the sentiments of many parents who have chosen private tutoring.

"Parents are just more tuned in to the workings of the classroom," says Fran Bowman, director of Bowman Educational Services, a small tutoring service in Columbia. "Now, parents want to know exactly what's happening to their child. They're not happy any more to just wait and see."

While exact figures aren't available on how many children are being tutored for reading problems, experts say they represent a large part of the clientele: "I definitely think that's a major issue, and sometimes their problems in math relate to their inability to read properly," says Garroway, the tutoring association executive.

Approaches to reading instruction vary among the centers but Sylvan and Huntington say phonics is the foundation of their programs. Ultimately, that depends on children's needs: "It's largely phonics-based, but that may not be appropriate for all," says Robert Redic, head of Huntington's Columbia center.

Christina Fatemi's troubles with math stemmed from problems with phonics, her mother says. "My daughter is part of that generation where they stopped teaching phonics," Fatemi says.

But tutors are loath to place all of the blame on the schools.

"Schools are doing far more than they've ever done before in the same number of days and in the same number of hours in the day," says Richard E. Bavaria, Sylvan's vice president for education and a former teacher and administrator in the Baltimore County schools. "They're doing heroic -- I think sometimes saintly -- work in meeting the needs of so many students."

Who can afford it?

With tutoring increasingly filling the gaps, some believe the long-term impact will be greater educational inequity between students whose families can afford tutoring and those who can't.

While there are many volunteer tutoring programs, their approach may not be as consistent or thorough as that of for-profit centers, many of which employ professional teachers, says Barbara Wasik, principal research scientist in the Center for Social Organization of Schools at the Johns Hopkins University.

Access for lower-income children to private tutoring may ultimately come through the public schools. Through its contract services division, Sylvan provides services to about 134 public schools in 20 districts from Compton, Calif., to about 25 schools in Baltimore and Baltimore County. Typically, schools use federal and state grants for these contracts.

Tutoring appears to work at Dundalk's Grange Elementary School, where fewer than half the students come from low-income homes and which has used Sylvan for five years at a cost of $80,000 a year. All third-graders at the school receive diagnostic testing and are tutored in reading, with four pupils per tutor.

"They are an excellent resource," Belsinger says. "Private tutoring is very expensive. In our community and in our situation, we wouldn't have that many families who can afford that kind of service."

Private tutoring can be a sacrifice. Kumon charges $75 a month. Sylvan charges $25 to $45 an hour, and Huntington charges $35 to $40 hourly.

In Columbia, Fatemi points out, only half-jokingly, that $480 a month is "a nice car." But the rise in her daughter's grades and confidence, she quickly notes, has been more than worth the money.

"I think financial involvement makes a very strong incentive," Fatemi says. "I've got money on the line. She knows that I'm not messing around."

Pub Date: 12/13/98