Confronting the Shadow Education System: What Government Policies for What Private Tutoring? (review)

In his latest book, Confronting the Shadow Education System, Mark Bray examines how the sheer size of the tutoring sector and its role in shaping schooling systems, the rhythms of family life, and the contours of social, economic, and educational inequality have been grossly underestimated by policy-makers. The term shadow education is meaningful. The term connotes not only how supplementary education follows the formal school system, but also how this largely unregulated sector has grown at a staggering rate with little notice from governments, policy-makers, and researchers.

In this well-documented book, Mark Bray examines the scale, nature, and implications of the private tutoring sector in a number of countries. Marshalling an impressive array of research, he informs us that in many countries this sector is a multi-billion dollar industry that absorbs a substantial amount of household resources. In several countries an upwards of 50 to 90 percent of school-aged children attend some form of tutoring. The sector includes one-on-one tutoring, as well as supplementary education offered by off-duty teachers, mom and pop operations, and large multinational, Internet, and correspondence corporations.

Beyond describing its sheer size and many forms, Bray describes the economic and social impact of the private tutoring sector. On a positive note, private tutoring may boost the performance of struggling and high-achieving students. Tutoring may also provide students with a constructive after-school activity, and tutors with supplemental income. It is conceivable that this sector contributes to economic growth by potentially enhancing language and numeracy skills.

Bray also outlines the darker side of the supplementary education sector. In countries with high tutoring rates, the social pressure to pay for supplementary education is enormous. Given the lower wages in some countries, tutoring is a crippling if not prohibited expense. Not surprisingly, national figures show that tutoring participation varies by social class; in some countries tutoring enrolment data also reveal huge rural and urban, gender, and racial and ethnic disparities. If these services give students a competitive advantage, supplementary education may widen social and economic inequalities. Equally problematic are tutoring systems that are married to the formal school system. In some countries teachers who use tutoring to supplement their pay have been known to purposefully withhold critical parts of lessons during the school day to encourage families to pay for their services after school hours. In other countries, initiatives such as No Child Left Behind provide monies for eligible parents to purchase private tutoring. These initiatives have been introduced with little accountability to monitor the efficacy of providers. Bray also notes that funds that are directed at private enterprises divert funds that might be used more efficiently by mainstream public schools.

In the last part of the book, Bray identifies possible government responses, and makes important policy recommendations that are sensitive to a range of economic and social conditions. Bray argues that policy-makers need to take into account the SES profiles of students, cultural contexts, and any other important factors. The context of tutoring in the United States, Canada, and Australia for example (countries that tend to encourage tutoring for low achievers) is very different from that of Korea and Japan (where tutoring is more likely to be used by high achievers). In order to assess the types of tutoring that should be encouraged or discouraged, Bray suggests that policy-makers need to consider the nature of the sector and whether tutoring rates vary by income group, gender, ethnicity or race, and location. In the concluding chapter, Bray begins this dialogue by outlining several key monitoring and evaluation “feedback loops” at the individual school level, district level, and national and international levels.

Overall, this book provides an accessible and balanced examination of this burgeoning sector. Beyond policy-makers, this book should be of interest to researchers in the fields of education, social and economic change, international trends, comparative research, and inequality.