New York City’s Tutoring Industry Grows With Competition for Admissions - NYTimes.com

New York City’s Tutoring Industry Grows With Competition for Admissions - NYTimes.com:

Fight for Middle School Spots Enriches Tutoring Firms

Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Left to right, Chloe Luk, Nicholas Lui, the teacher Paola Higuera and Harry Swanson at a prep course at Bright Kids NYC.

By ANNA M. PHILLIPS

Published: April 15, 2012

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As their parents sat anxiously in a waiting room, five children were sharpening their test-taking skills in a tutoring center in TriBeCa, underlining words that might hold clues to the answers and crossing off the illogical multiple-choice options intended to trip them up. For homework, there were more practice problems.

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The tutoring business has come a long way from Stanley Kaplan’s basement in Brooklyn, and test-preparation courses for college or private school admission are practically a rite of American education. But in New York City, where even seats in public schools can 

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by larrycuban

U-Va. cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham, author of “Why Don’t Students Like School?.” This post appeared September 14, 2009.
 Since the publication of Howard Gardner‘ Frames of Mind in the early 1980s in which he pointed out the many ways that children and adults learn, popularization of “multiple intelligences” in the early 1990s has fused multiple intelligences with teaching to different “learning styles.” Practitioners have glommed onto multiple intelligences and different learning styles. Schools have committed themselves to cultivating multiple learning styles such as the Key Learning Community in Indianapolis (IN). Willingham challenges the concept of varied learning styles and offers an alternative explanation for how and what children learn–their background, interests, aptitudes, and knowledge they bring to a topic–rather than “learning styles.”

The Big Idea behind learning styles is that kids vary in how they learn: Some learn best by looking (visual learners), some by listening (auditory learners), and some by manipulating things (kinesthetic learners).
According to the theory, if we know what sort of a learner a child is, we can optimize his or her learning by