Is Tutoring a Band-Aid for a Poorly Designed System?

Let me get this out of the way first: I’m not anti-tutoring. I've served as an academic tutor for elementary, middle, and high school students, privately and through various public and private tutoring agencies. Extra help can be a lifesaver for kids who need a boost, and nearly all of the tutors I've met are dedicated to helping kids learn.

But when so many schools and districts are scrambling to hire tutoring agencies using ESSER money, state grants, or private dollars, maybe the real question isn’t “How do we scale tutoring?” but rather, “Why do we need so much of it in the first place?”

While tutoring might seem like a magic fix for students who aren't keeping up with their school's curricula, it's important to see it for what it is: a band-aid on a system that is designed with cracks through which students continue to fall. When one-on-one sessions become the default remedy for a system's design flaws, we’re treating symptoms, not the condition.

So in this article, I’m digging into that bigger condition of how our current school model quietly creates the demand for endless tutoring and what we could do instead of always having to run to the store for more band-aids.

Why the System’s Rigged for Gaps

In a typical classroom, a middle school math teacher may have 32 students, each with varying levels of readiness, attention, and background knowledge specific to a range of various math concepts and skills. The curriculum map might expect all students to master a concept such as "multi-step equations" by mid-October, regardless of where they began in September or what they each were able to master the year before. There’s little time to pause, reteach, or let students catch up—especially when pacing guides are tied to standardized test schedules.

Now imagine one of those students—let’s call her Mariah. She missed two weeks in September due to a family move. She’s bright, curious, modestly struggling in math, but is now completely lost in the sea of forward motion. Her teacher cares deeply, but simply can’t slow down for just one student.

So Mariah gets referred for tutoring.

But what Mariah needed wasn’t tutoring. She needed time. She needed flexibility. She needed space to say, “I’m not ready to move on yet,” and a system that would say, “That’s okay.” Pulling Mariah out for tutoring is a band-aid on a pacing guide wound.

Some would argue that the assigned tutoring is the time and flexibility built into the system. However, while Mariah shows up to her tutor and does her best to catch up, her teacher continues to introduce new content, some of which requires that unlearned material to be understood. Mariah then finds herself asking her tutor to connect these academic dots and help her keep up with the rest of the class. Thus, tutoring becomes a supplement to the school's "effective" teaching and learning system.

What Mariah doesn't know is that several other classmates are in a similar situation, but more importantly, many other students would not have tutors and would simply struggle to keep up with the expected curriculum schedule, slowly falling further behind over time.

Mariah is not alone in her experience with a structure that isn't offering what students need.

This structure standardizes content, but not support. It differentiates assignments, but not pacing. It mandates coverage, not mastery. Tutoring ends up doing what the classroom couldn't: responding to the student, not the system.

How Tutoring Highlights a Core Issue

Tutoring is often treated as a remedy for learning gaps, but where do those learning gaps come from? Design decisions about curriculum, assessment, behavior management, and structural relationships in the classroom create them.

Take Jamal, a 4th grader reading below grade level. His school uses a scripted reading program where students experience best practices such as reading aloud from grade-level texts, responding to pre-written comprehension questions, and rotating through group stations to practice reading in small groups and share thoughts about reading. Jamal’s teacher is told not to deviate from this program. When Jamal struggles, he’s pulled out of class for extra reading help. Eventually, he’s assigned to a tutoring group after school.

But what if Jamal could read texts he chose, at a level he understood, while building up skills through interest-driven practice and adult-guided reflection? That might sound like tutoring to some and seem like a recipe for "no growth" if implemented in a classroom setting. But what if his classroom teacher had the freedom and training to adjust the instruction to Jamal’s needs, not just the curriculum’s expectations? Suddenly, what sounds like costly after-school tutoring or ineffective student learning is a more flexible and personalized schooling model.

In other words, tutoring isn’t solving the real problem. It’s just rearranging the furniture in a room that was poorly designed in the first place. School shouldn't require tutoring for students to keep up with school. This traditional schooling model has resulted in private tutoring agencies with public and private funding to address only those students who have the resources or know-how to access high-quality tutoring services. What we think is flexibility in the system is actually unintended privatization of equity in education.

The Privatization of Equity

Tutoring often claims to promote equity and flexibility for all students, but let’s look closer.

Consider two high schoolers: Ava and Luis. Ava’s parents hire a private tutor twice a week. They check in on her school portal daily and meet with her teachers and counselor regularly. When Ava falls behind in Algebra, the tutor adjusts strategies, reinforces concepts, and keeps her on track.

Luis doesn’t have that luxury. His school offers tutoring, but only during lunch or after school. Since Luis works afternoons to help his family, he often misses those sessions. He attends lunch session, but it is only 30 minutes and often involves as much as 10 minutes of focused attention on Luis. The school is concerned because his grades have stagnated, and he is not passing all of his classes. The counselor recommends summer school.

In this story, the tutoring isn’t the problem. The problem is who the system is designed to support by default. The more we rely on external solutions to supplement core learning, the more we shift responsibility from public systems to private safety nets. And the more we reward those with access to time, money, and advocacy, the less “equity” means in practice.

What Luis needed wasn’t better tutoring options. He needed a learning structure that adapts to real life, not the other way around.

What Should We Be Asking Instead?

Rather than asking how to expand tutoring programs, the questions we need to be asking explore the core of the school system's design:

• Why are we still using age-based grade levels when we've observed that learning doesn't happen on an age-based schedule?

  
  

• Why are students expected to master the same content at the same pace regardless of their context, strengths, or circumstances?

  
  

• Why do we define success by seat time and test scores rather than demonstrated understanding, personal growth, and self-direction?

  
  

• Why are teachers expected to be both curriculum enforcers and personalization experts, without the time, autonomy, or support to do either well?

Imagine a schooling model where the student, not the syllabus, is coached by teachers to set their learning pace. A model where learning plans adapt to the child, not the other way around. One where teachers act as mentors and co-designers of learning pathways, not just managers of compliance. Where academic rigor is still present but grows through agency and autonomy, not standardized acceleration.

A Call for Structural Change: The Self-Directed Schooling Model

All of the issues above—rigid pacing, curriculum mismatch, privatized support, inequitable access, reactive interventions—are symptoms of a system built for standardization rather than personalization.

The solution is not to scale tutoring; it’s to rebuild the system so students don’t need so much of it. A Self-Directed Schooling model does exactly that.

In this model, students learn to set their own learning goals, monitor their progress, and reflect on their growth with support from mentors and peers. Learning is competency-based and integrated with real-world applications. Classrooms become workshops of inquiry and skill-building rather than conveyor belts of content. Flexibility isn’t a privilege—it’s embedded in the structure. Support isn’t outsourced—it’s embedded in the daily rhythm of the school.

And tutoring? It becomes a rare service. Because when students are empowered, supported, and trusted, they don’t need rescuing. They need resources, coaching, and room to grow metacognitively—academically, socially, and emotionally, with agency and self-determination.

Final Thought

Tutoring doesn’t have to disappear—it just needs a new job description. Imagine tutors re-cast as on-call learning mentors, embedded in a self-directed ecosystem the same way a librarian, counselor, or tech coach is. Instead of plugging gaps after school hours, they float through classrooms during the day, joining teacher-mentor teams, running quick goal-setting check-ins, or offering one-on-one strategy boosts when a student asks for help.

In that role, a lean tutoring staff becomes a cost-effective human resource—another layer of expertise students can pull from alongside peers, digital platforms, and print materials. The difference? Students are coached to seek out whatever resource best fits their plan (including a tutor) rather than waiting to be rescued when they fall behind.

So yes, keep a few “tutors” on payroll—just make sure they’re part of the design, not a band-aid. Let’s aim for schools where every learner knows how to assemble their own support team and chart their own pathway.

Stop outsourcing fixes. Structure for self-direction—and let human support amplify it.

Greg Mullen

June 12, 2025

General Consult

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