On shadow education

A recent article raises more questions than answers

Education has turned into a complex game of chess for parents. Photo by Piotr Makowski on Unsplash

Sometimes articles are so context-specific that we can tend to switch off. Certainly, in Australia, and more specifically New South Wales (NSW) where I live and teach, we have a confluence of systemic factors that make some discussions very particular to this specific country, state, and perhaps moment in time. But being an English teacher, I look at everything as a microcosm—there is always something universal to be learned from the particular.

Take Robert Pondiscio’s excellent in-depth account of the outsized achievement at Success Academy, which he titles, How the Other Half Learns. My enduring takeaway was that after a long examination of the school’s teaching, learning and behaviour practices and the socio-cultural factors that shape enrolment (not to mention the staying power of parents in this strict environment), the school had, in practice, selected for ultra-committed families.

I’ve seen similar strategies play out where students from certain ethnicities—those from cultural backgrounds who put education on a pedestal—are targeted in the competition for independent school enrolments. The tactics applied at Success, namely engineering peer effects, can be transposed to new contexts to raise standards, not only in academics but in creating a contagious culture of learning.

Similarly, Katherine Paige Harden, in her book The Genetic Lottery, highlights a natural experiment in Communist Romania where orphans, born as a result of Ceaușescu’s oppressive pro-natalist policies, suffered severe cognitive stunting due to extreme emotional and physical deprivation. Following the fall of Communism, the conditions in these orphanages shocked visitors.

Some Western scientists saw an opportunity to study the long-term effects of such deprivation—some children were placed into foster care or adopted into nurturing families, effectively entering a “lottery” of improved environments. The IQ of fostered children partially recovered in more caring environments. What can we take from this? Relationships matter for learning. We can certainly hold students back from reaching their potential in the absence of stimulation; here I’m thinking knowledge-rich curricula and high expectations for all.

On this point, is it possible that schools are not helping students reach the heights of their potential in NSW? Is it a less extreme version of Harden’s Romania, where systemic limits are placed on students’ capacity? We have a unique system here, with one of the highest levels of academic and social segregation in the OECD. Private schools in Australia receive state and federal funding with no cap on what schools can charge in fees.

In addition, NSW has the highest proportion of academically selective schools of any state in Australia. While they are public, they happen to draw from families occupying the highest quartile of the Index of Socio-Educational Advantage. A housing crisis also means that academically successful public schools in leafy green areas are firstly segregated due to local housing costs, and secondly oversubscribed.

As this is my first post of the new year, I am taking a meandering path to the focus of this piece, and that’s shadow education, the coaching and tutoring that occurs outside the formal schooling system. According to this recent Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) article, it’s a billion-dollar industry in Australia. The question I have is whether the specific problem of tutoring in NSW could be indicative of broader issues.

So, why might NSW be such a hotbed of tutoring? I can speak anecdotally on a couple of possibilities. When I moved to Sydney, we chose a very multicultural suburb. Our blonde children were always placed at the centre of school photos so as not to disrupt the symmetry of mostly Korean and Chinese children in their grade, which was made up almost exclusively of students with language backgrounds other than English.

It was a given that many students attended tutoring for all of Saturday, with the hope of entering selective schools. I’ve written about the cultural aspects here. The SMH article calculates the proportion of tutored students entering selective schools in Year 7 at 20%, but I think this is a self-report issue; families know that coaching for the entry test is frowned upon, but either can’t comfortably afford private school or don’t want to put all their eggs into public school, where the peer effects and segregation I mentioned earlier mean that a lot of public schools aren’t even physically safe.

The article mentions that students are pre-taught content by coaching colleges, which is frustrating for teachers who prepare lessons only to find out that students have already learned that material from their tutor. I’m not sure if the colleges know how effective this strategy is, or whether it’s deliberate, but the end result could potentially be multiple exposures to content and a chance for teachers to check for misunderstandings and give additional support. I’m not seeing a collaborative approach between colleges and schools any time soon though!

Again anecdotally, I have heard of colleges stealing materials from schools via their student-clients, only for those materials to turn up again at the school, with students saying, “My tutor told me to use this.” Tutors also have a nasty habit of assigning a speculative grade for assessment, no doubt evidence of their fabulous tuition, and then asking their students to approach their class teacher for a remark. This never goes over well. Suffice it to say, as the system currently stands, shadow education is a problem.

I’ve hinted at some of the equity reasons that parents might approach a tutor. The systemic issues certainly feed into this. But parents who might struggle to pay school fees (and even ones who don’t) may wish to ensure that they’re getting what they need out of their child’s schooling—ironically this often means seeking support outside the school, which is now normalised to the point where schools sometimes even suggest paying a tutor.

In the current climate, nobody wants to engage in teacher-bashing, but there would almost certainly be cases where a school or teacher is not effectively educating a child. And with competition for university places (which I like to call “life chances”), it’s not hard to see why even private school parents would want to dig into their pockets to throw some good money after bad.

I recently remembered an older article by Stephen Ball¹, which is not my usual cup of tea, but as it happens, it raises an alternative explanation for the rise of shadow education, certainly in affluent parts of the world. He argues that education policy and societal expectations increasingly place the “work of learning”—both inside and outside school—on families, which disproportionately benefits those with more social, cultural, and economic resources.

These demands include navigating complex systems of school choice, which may even require the strategic choice of where families live, enrichment activities, and tutoring. And of course, where there is demand for this expanded offering, the market will provide. The really interesting point he makes is that within this new environment of heightened expectations,

even a good school and good teachers are no longer adequate. The state and its schools can no longer be trusted on their own to deliver social advantage and social reproduction, which effective, choosing parents expect.

So is the rise of shadow education a symptom or a cause of this new kind of parenting? Researchers like Jonathan Haidt have noted the rise of more structured, risk-averse parenting styles. So in a way, Ball’s article has aged well. I’m left with a lot of valid justifications for parents seeking out tutoring. The SMH article highlights the moral panic but seems to downplay the idea that tutoring is a pretty reliable way to ensure results.

We’re left with a chicken and egg problem; did parents start seeking tutoring because of an inequitable and dysfunctional system or did they unknowingly exacerbate the problem? Or more likely, is tutoring the straw man for a system that can’t meet parental and societal expectations for reasons that are too complex to disentangle? The story of tutoring in NSW is both uniquely ours and reflective of broader truths: when systems falter, individuals—and the market—inevitably adapt.

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1. Ball, S. J. (2010). New class inequalities in education: Why education policy may be looking in the wrong place! Education policy, civil society and social class. International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, 30(3/4), 155–166. https://doi.org/10.1108/01443331011033346