I'm going to tell you something that costs my own business money.

Don't force your kid into one-on-one tutoring.

Not because tutoring doesn't work. It does. But the results belong almost entirely to the kids who actually do the work, and no amount of money you spend converts an unwilling kid into a willing one.

Let me give you the case that made me sure of this.

One of our instructors had a student who came in with an ACT composite of 17. By his most recent sitting, he was at a 31.

He's the third boy in that family we've worked with. The oldest had a similar story, somewhere around a 16 up to a 31.

So what happened?

The honest answer is not what parents want it to be. It wasn't a technique. It wasn't a magic sequence of practice tests.

In the beginning it was, in his instructor's words, almost like pulling teeth. He wasn't lazy. He always did his work. He was overwhelmed, and he was discouraged, and those are different problems from lazy and they don't respond to the same pressure.

Wha...