The Report Card with Nat Malkus
Oct 7, 2026 · 59 min · 10 segments
Kumon, Sylvan Learning, Mathnasium, and Huntington Learning Center—these private tutoring chains are familiar names, but they have received little attention from education researchers. According to…
Nat MalkusHost
So Josh, I wanna take a step back here and, and just kind of back up to tutoring in general.
Last time you were on "The Report Card," we were talking, uh, with you, uh, and I think it was Matt Craft, on, uh, tutoring generally.
Um, just generally speaking, w- what have we learned about tutoring in general? I mean, it was supposed to be a great way to shore up pandemic learning loss.
Uh, people are really excited about tutoring, and, and I think for good reason.
There is really good research saying that w- one-on-one or small group tutoring is a very effective intervention.
Now, some of the really big numbers that were being thrown around early on turned out to be a little bit too big because, as Matt Craft and others have shown, when you start to study the programs as they really go to scale, the efficacy goes down.
Certainly it's still large, it's just not quite as crazy large as people originally thought.
But the big challenge is figuring out how you scale these things, because if an important ingredient is having, you know, motivated, knowledgeable tutors, there's a finite pool of those humans around.
And so, uh, that's one of the reasons I was also interested in this topic of the tutoring centers because they are doing something at scale, although not the scale people thought post-pandemic we would need where every kid in the country would get a tutor.
These tutoring centers have a reputation for being pretty big in other countries.
So I mean, we're talking about it in the American context, but particularly in some East Asian countries, these, these are, uh, a, a, a big factor.
Um, is there a literature on the effects of these tutoring centers in other countries?
The, in some sense, this culture, this tradition of after-school tutoring centers really comes from China, South Korea, Japan.
Um, I have yet to see a sort of well-done causal study in those countries on the impacts of these centers.
It, it's generally really challenging because it's not random where these centers show up.
But they're huge in, in those countries, and it's probably no accident that in the US, one of the things we fi- we find most clearly is that these centers tend to locate in places where there are high numbers of Asian Americans who presumably have some family tradition or knowledge of this kind of family investment
So when you look at some of the international tests, right? PISA just came out, or if you look at, um, you know, TIMSS or these other international tests, and you'll see many of these same countries that you m-mentioned score very well, and then some folks to explain this will say, "Well, you know, they have this huge tutoring industrial complex." And it's not just that they have firms.
So Josh, I wanna take a step back here and, and just kind of back up to tutoring in general.
Last time you were on "The Report Card," we were talking, uh, with you, uh, and I think it was Matt Craft, on, uh, tutoring generally.
Um, just generally speaking, w- what have we learned about tutoring in general? I mean, it was supposed to be a great way to shore up pandemic learning loss.
Uh, people are really excited about tutoring, and, and I think for good reason.
There is really good research saying that w- one-on-one or small group tutoring is a very effective intervention.
Now, some of the really big numbers that were being thrown around early on turned out to be a little bit too big because, as Matt Craft and others have shown, when you start to study the programs as they really go to scale, the efficacy goes down.
Certainly it's still large, it's just not quite as crazy large as people originally thought.
But the big challenge is figuring out how you scale these things, because if an important ingredient is having, you know, motivated, knowledgeable tutors, there's a finite pool of those humans around.
And so, uh, that's one of the reasons I was also interested in this topic of the tutoring centers because they are doing something at scale, although not the scale people thought post-pandemic we would need where every kid in the country would get a tutor.
These tutoring centers have a reputation for being pretty big in other countries.
So I mean, we're talking about it in the American context, but particularly in some East Asian countries, these, these are, uh, a, a, a big factor.
Um, is there a literature on the effects of these tutoring centers in other countries?
The, in some sense, this culture, this tradition of after-school tutoring centers really comes from China, South Korea, Japan.
Um, I have yet to see a sort of well-done causal study in those countries on the impacts of these centers.
It, it's generally really challenging because it's not random where these centers show up.
But they're huge in, in those countries, and it's probably no accident that in the US, one of the things we fi- we find most clearly is that these centers tend to locate in places where there are high numbers of Asian Americans who presumably have some family tradition or knowledge of this kind of family investment
So when you look at some of the international tests, right? PISA just came out, or if you look at, um, you know, TIMSS or these other international tests, and you'll see many of these same countries that you m-mentioned score very well, and then some folks to explain this will say, "Well, you know, they have this huge tutoring industrial complex." And it's not just that they have firms.
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