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A Reading Game center in San Francisco dangles the same kinds of knicknacks as rewards, but Eighth-Grader Andrew Morris seeks a bigger prize. He hopes to boost his test scores so he can apply to a prestigious high school. In English, he has climbed from B to A. Equally important, he says, "it's helped me to feel more confident."
The tab for such results can be steep. Reading Game generally teaches pupils for 48 hours, costing a total of about $1,000. Sylvan recommends 36-hour blocks ($900); Huntington averages roughly 120 hours ($2,600). Says Nell P. Eurich, a trustee of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and an expert on remedial training: "My only concern is that so few people can afford this type of program." Yet there has been no shortage of applicants to the centers ever since Reading Game Founder and President Kenneth Martyn opened his first one in Huntington Beach 16 years ago. Martyn, a former professor of special education at California State University at Los Angeles, became intrigued by the possibility of tutorial centers after doing a study in the '60s on California's public schools.
Citing a need for quality control, Martyn has only seven Reading Game centers under franchise. "It's not like selling hamburgers," he says. His competition, by contrast, has gone predominantly into franchises, and all three companies are offering or moving into subjects such as writing, speed writing and algebra. The cost of setting up a franchise with Sylvan or Huntington is around $50,000 to $100,000, depending on size. The typical licensee is a businessman; Huntington Founder Ray Huntington was a business analyst for AT&T. Sylvan's president Berry Fowler, however, was a junior high art teacher until he switched to tutoring at one of the early Reading Game centers, then jumped ship to form his own organization.
The teaching centers seem one of those ideas that please just about everybody, including businessmen: last year Sylvan was taken over by a child- care conglomerate called Kinder-Care Learning Centers, Inc. for $5.2 million in stock (some $3 million for Fowler). And Encyclopedia Britannica absorbed Reading Game for an undisclosed price. Huntington remains independent, its owner ebullient about the future of teaching for profit. "It's an American response to an academic problem," he says. "You can solve this problem and make money too."