COUNTING ON TUTORS
More students in Ontario are enrolling in after-school programs to boost math skills,
Four years ago, Arsheen Abbas signed her son up for private afterschool math lessons because she felt the Grade 4 subject curriculum was not rigorous enough.
The Oakville, Ont., mother enrolled her son in Spirit of Math — one of several private tutoring companies in Ontario — in hopes of bolstering his learning at an early stage.
“They are not teaching math the same way that we used to be taught,” Abbas said of the lessons her son was receiving in school. “One of our concerns, which we’ve heard from many parents, is that once (students) get to high school, all of a sudden they are flabbergasted by the amount of math or kind of math they need to do.”
Abbas’s son, who is now in Grade 8 and still attends Spirit of Math classes, is among a growing number of students in Ontario using private af- ter-school tutoring businesses to boost their math education.
The rise in enrolment at such programs coincides with a decline in math scores on standardized tests among elementary students in the province. Tutoring companies such as Kumon and Oxford Learning say they help students develop independent learning skills, and Spirit of Math says it coaches already highachieving students to greater academic heights. But some critics say the for-profit programs are out of reach for less affluent families, while others caution they may not be the right fit for every child.
Ontario’s Ministry of Education wasn’t able to provide data on how many students attend private tutoring programs, but Kumon, Oxford and Spirit of Math reported significant increases in enrolment over the past five years. As of October, more than 28,000 students were enrolled in Kumon math programs in Ontario alone, the company said.
The latest results of Ontario’s standardized tests, administered by the Education Quality and Accountabili- ty Office, show math test scores among public elementary school students have not improved in recent years. The Ministry of Education has allocated $8 million for this school year to the Ontario Focused Intervention Partnership initiative.
The program, delivered through schools, helps kids from kindergarten to Grade 6 develop literacy and numeracy skills outside the classroom through before and afterschool tutoring, homework clubs and other programs, said government spokesperson Heather Irwin.
Private math tutoring services, nonetheless, remain popular, though they come at a cost. Those costs are too expensive for many families, said Mary Reid, a professor at the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.
Racialized kids and kids who live in lower-income neighbourhoods are more likely to end up in applied math classes, instead of the academic stream, Reid said, and those same kids, who arguably need more support in math, are also less likely to receive private, out-of-class lessons.