Keep tutoring in private hands

The Sun's editorial question regarding tutoring ("Is tutoring effective?" Oct. 11) can be answered easily. In a free-enterprise society accountability is provided most effectively by businesses, which have a financial incentive to provide the best possible service, and their customers, who can vote with their feet and their dollars.

Families with children in need of tutoring under the No Child Left Behind program are smart enough to detect inadequate tutoring services and are currently free to seek alternative tutoring. The Sun apparently thinks it should be otherwise. It laments freedom of educational choice, arguing for increased regulation of tutoring companies by bureaucrats and politicians. It would give state agents the power to narrow "the list of approved firms from which parents could choose." Better yet, it would prefer that tutoring funds be shifted from the private sector to Maryland government so that "the city schools could use the money earmarked for tutoring for forms of intervention such as extended school days or longer summer school sessions."

Best of all: "let Baltimore City run the tutoring program itself."

Angelo Mirabella, Silver Spring