Why Your Kids Need Tuition

I refer to the article "Tuition Culture Has To Go" (TODAY)  and WP Png Eng's Huat's request for MOE to do a proper survey on why tuition is pervasive in our school system today.

Let me introduce myself. I am a senior teacher who had taught English and Math for over twenty-five years before retiring recently. When I first started teaching decades ago, few students needed tuition even though academic content in those days were more demanding. That was because teachers were actually a lot more focused on teaching properly. Teachers also were given ample time to mark homework and prepare lessons. Hence, fewer students need tuition.

Things started to change in the early 2000s when the performance evaluation for teachers was revamped to compare teachers against teachers in the grade. It was still bearable at first, but with each passing year, the work demands increased. With each year, we were expected to do more for our CCAs, our committee work, school administrative duties. The quantity of the workload increased, along with the complexity and demands of the non-teaching work. 

Over the years, teachers gradually spent less and less time on lesson preparation. They were also increasingly expected to do lesson preparation and marking of homework at home. In the last school that I taught at before retirement, teachers were openly told that their free periods were meant for doing administrative work, small group meetings and CCA matters. Those took absolute priority over lesson preparation and marking, which all should be done in the evening at home and shouldn't be done in school unless you had no other school duties to attend to. The school didn't care that many of us had families to care for in the evenings, or that we entitled to some rest. As what one of my acquaintances, who is a boss in an SME employing a number of cheap foreign labour, would say, "If I cannot exploit my workers by making them work very long hours for low pay, my business cannot survive!'.

The current evaluation system is also such that it rewards teachers for neglecting their teaching and spending more of their time on their non-teaching duties. Poor teaching can always be compensated by excellent performance in non-teaching duties, but the reverse is not true. I know of many competent and skilled teachers who receive poor performance reviews on a regular basis despite producing good results, simply because of the small roles they play in their non-teaching duties. 

Many school leaders I know are not being honest when they say teaching is paramount, and the other school duties are secondary importance. Most teachers know that is not true even if the school leader formally announces that teaching is the most important. We all know of numerous colleagues and superiors who got promoted in spite of mediocre or below average teaching simply because they were actively involved in CCA and other important non-teaching school projects. In fact, that is the career balance by majority of teachers today - sacrifice quality of teaching and compensate it with non-teaching work. This trade off is actually much better for promotion prospects.

If teaching well and time spent on preparing good lessons is increasingly disrespected during the school hours, then it should make logical sense that students would need to turn to tuition for help. You will also understand better when you see some teachers vigorously defending why they need to be doing so many different activities. Whether you agree with them or not, it still means those said teachers are cutting back on attention on their teaching and your kids in their classes need to get a tutor, so that the teacher can spend more of her time doing her other duties in peace.

Here is how many schools operate: teacher neglects teaching and spends more time on her CCA and school committee work. Student seeks help from tuition to make up for the poor teaching in school. Student shows improvement in results. School and teacher claims credit that they did a wonderful job in teaching because of some new teaching strategy they are now rolling out. In the MOE system, schools are trained to treat tuition and tutors as ghosts as though they do not exist. An equivalent would be our Singapore National Conversation where opposition views not invited and sidelined when collecting feedback.