Notes on Parenting & Tutors
At a curriculum night, my son’s English teacher told the gathered parents that tutors should not be writing papers for students. Maybe I am naive, but I was a little shocked. This was a Brooklyn school, not a place with billionaires taking private jets to St. Barts for the weekend. I knew ChatGPT was an issue, which also came up, but this seemed somehow more corrupt and orchestrated. In the midst of the collegial evening, the teacher’s comment suddenly illuminated, for a moment, the ugly fact that rich people weren’t just buying opportunities for their children but were brazenly cheating.
The practice is hardly uncommon. David Blobaum from the National Test Prep Association told me that he was approached by a parent to write a kid’s college essay and he refused. “Honestly, these parents should think of themselves as hiring a criminal, not a tutor,” he said. I heard about another tutor who did write a college essay for a kid, after a certain amount of moral struggle, figuring that if she didn’t do it someone else would.
By now the caricature of rich parents trying to buy a way into the Ivy League for their children is familiar, but some of what I heard was still startling. A tutor at an otherwise legitimate tutoring business told me that the company sends her “a ninth-grade math homework, and I finish it and send it back without ever even meeting the kid.” Or they send a U.S. history paper to be written in the next three hours.
