Your comment "A lot of these orgs are playing directly into fears about standardized testing, etc."

Watching Sylvans' advertizing does exactly what you wrote. Playing the "fear" game to desperate parents.
IMHO I think the system is "test crazed". I found myself sucked into that frame of mind when we first began homescholaring our crew over a decade ago. Spent far too much time photo copying standardized tests at the university teachers library. I actually created curriculum based around the
tests My "fear" was our kids had to learn what their peers (ps) were learning or they weren't learning. Does that make sense

Real learning happened when I quit worrying about those exams. Amazing results when they were given freedom to explore. We combined Language arts with social studies to avoid like Nancy wrote " a bunch of blather " . Math also blended in well with the sciences.

Special ed teachers are lucky here, their students can be exempted from writing standardized tests which gives the teacher freedom to actually teach based on the students needs. The elementry school had 300 kids over 100 were in special ed In a lot of cases, there was nothing wrong with the kids but the label "special ed" , fetches the school board a lot more $$$Money$$$$ It's too bad that parents can't see the connection.

A teacher was let go (fired) a few years ago here. Guess what she's doing now...... writting standardized tests for the government . Ahhhh yes, the blind leading the blind

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Replying to:

Bobby,

Anytime. I think the same goes for many of the "copy cat" Sylvan organizations, like Kumon and Score. Score relies heavily on computers so clients can practice their "independence" in learning.

As a teacher of autistic students, I see desperate parents running to these organizations and coughing up a lot of cash, but I wonder how much of a social pressure issue it is more than anything else. A lot of these orgs are playing directly into fears about standardized testing, etc.

The only thing that I've heard about them is that they supposedly stole a friend of mine's free spelling system that she'd put online for anyone who wanted to use it, and made it their own.

If you're interested in what the National Councils of teachers of every subject matter say should be learned from preschool until secondary graduation, you might want to look at the compendium that mcrel.org has put up on its website (also free).

As for the teacher, Noel I think it was, who said that he gives his syllabus and phone number to each parent--kudos to you, but not every teacher does that.

I think that if you asked the schools for a detailed curriculum, you'd be shocked to find that they don't have one. They might have a bunch of blather that a bunch of teachers threw together over vacation time on stipend pay, but as for measurable learning objectives, tied to classroom instruction and learning materials, tied to the end-of-year achievement tests--well, it's probably not there. So you may want to raise hell at your schools until it IS there. Why should you have to pay extra if the schools aren't doing their job?

Nancy

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Replying to:

Has anyone used this company or know anything about it?