Teen: “I’ve had every tutor possible.”

Mom: “He won’t want help but then test time comes and he panics and we scramble to get a tutor.”

This was a conversation I had a few months ago. The Mom continued:

“School is affecting our homelife badly. It consumes any time we have with each other, as you see it just creates conflict and bad feelings.”

And I did see…the tension was palpable.

This family was stuck in the tutor trap. Here’s what that means:

When students start struggling in a subject, most families default to getting help for that subject.

Math tutor. Science tutor. English tutor.

The tutor comes in, helps students study for the next test, the grade is “saved”… and everyone breathes again. Until the next test. And the next.

Effort goes into succeeding on individual tests without building capacity for the student to learn autonomously and succeed on their own. That’s the trap.

Tutoring turns into a band-aid for a deeper problem. I’ve worked with a lot of families who tried tutors for years without moving the needle.

I've done traditional tutoring and have worked with excellent tutors who help students master content. But I dedicated my career to equipping students with learning systems because of what I saw repeatedly: great tutoring can't compensate for missing foundational skills.

Most students aren’t struggling with content from a specific subject. They’re struggling with the SKILLS to learn content. And most teens haven’t been taught how to build these skills using their existing schoolwork.

Skills like time management, critical thinking, task initiation, resourcefulness and focus alongside note-taking, studying and test-taking - these form the foundation for sustained learning success and grades that reflect students’ true potential.

The more families focus on fixing subjects instead of building skills, the more dependent teens become on outside help to stay afloat (and the more they internalize that they’re “not good at” or “smart enough in” certain subjects).

Think of it this way: if the foundation of a house is unstable, it doesn’t matter how nice the kitchen is - you’ll keep getting cracks in the wall. Tutoring is like repainting the walls every time the cracks show up. Skills development is fixing the foundation.

You can’t renovate your way out of a foundation problem, just like you can’t tutor your way out of poor systems.

A learning system builds students' capacity to:

When students have these skills, they start owning their learning and, interestingly enough, become better at identifying whether they actually need tutoring.

So - when is tutoring a good idea? When is it most likely to achieve the goal of sustained academic gains?

Tutoring works when there’s a gap in content knowledge - when teens need subject-specific instruction to supplement their classroom experience - as opposed to an underlying skills deficit (e.g. the foundation is strong, the wall does need repainting).

Here’s what that can look like:

1) Your teen is missing foundational content. A student coasts through early algebra because they're naturally quick with numbers, but they never mastered the fundamentals. Then they hit quadratic equations and suddenly nothing makes sense. Tutoring in this case can be helpful because it builds essential knowledge the student needs to understand the material and progress on their own.

2) Catching up after an absence. Missed two weeks of school due to illness? Tutoring can help address gaps that arise from missing class and ensure they’re well prepared to move forward.

3) Advanced concepts or material. Some material is just hard. AP Physics, organic chemistry - even strong learners benefit from subject expertise to understand complex content, especially if taking multiple advanced courses at the same time. But notice: they’re not struggling with foundational skills like self-starting or time management, they just need someone to help unpack difficult material.

Signs that tutoring isn’t the solution:

The bottom line: tutoring is a tool. But it’s the wrong tool for the most common problem: that our kids don’t know HOW to learn.

The family I mentioned at the beginning? About six weeks after we started working together, the Mom texted me: "Just wanted you to know we had a great weekend. School didn't come up once. He's feeling proud of himself and his grades are holding. We're so relieved.”

This student’s grades went from a mix of C’s and B’s with the occasional A to consistent A’s. More importantly, he stopped thinking he wasn’t “good” at school and weekends stopped being a battleground.

That's what happens when you fix the foundation instead of repainting the walls.

Cheers to strong foundations,

Kelsey