I am interested, but I'm not surprised. I don't know all the details, but it seems predictable to me that wealthy, privileged people will expend wealth and exert privilege to ensure that their kids go to colleges that we associate with wealth and privilege. The Boston Globe coverage yesterday made the undeniable point that wealthy people already have huge – completely legal – advantages in elite education. You can make a pretty good case that people like me just make matters worse, since we get paid to help students excel in their courses, master the nuances of standardized tests, and advocate for themselves for the best college placement. What's the difference between us and the coaches who recruited students who had never played their sport, you might ask?
There are crucial differences, and the first one has to do with honesty. I have a reminder on my desktop: "tell truths." It is surprisingly seductive as a teacher to engage in euphemism, to word a comment in a way that will spare the student's self-esteem or smooth things over with an anxious parent. But the kind of quid pro quo corruption that these legal cases describe really is the exception rather than the rule. By and large the private educators I know share a respect for the value that undergirds all education: truth.
If truth is the foundational value of education, opportunity must be the next in line. Our public education system is a sort of testimonial to the social mobility and egalitarianism that we call the American dream, and we solo players aspire to dream that dream. True, we tend to be more entrepreneurial than our colleagues in the classroom. But all educators are generally generous people, who know that knowledge is more in the nature of a gift than a product or commodity. Many of us, even the most expensive of us, have places in our student loads for pro bono cases. The Bay Area Tutoring Summit has a whole program to broaden access to the kind of high-touch educational services we offer our paying clients.
All that said, if truth and opportunity are the key values of education, the truth is is that almost all of us could do a lot more to provide opportunity to a broader spectrum of students. As tutoring becomes more and more professionalized, it is important that tutors and college advisors stay connected with the best instincts of our profession. The young people damaged by this scandal have learned a tough lesson; let's teach them happier ones.
