How the new SAT could affect the tutoring industry

In my last post, I took the College Board to task for its boast that its partnership with Khan Academy has led to a 19% decrease in the use of paid prep, presumably defined as classes or tutoring, although the College Board fails to specify.  Aside from the questionable basis for that statistic (exactly  how was it obtained? what were the characteristics of the groups  surveyed? how were the demographic changes incurred by the adoption  of the SAT as a state test taken into account?), I do think its worth exploring  the question of just how the new SAT might affect the tutoring industry. For what its worth, Ive heard from a number of  tutors that their business is actually up this year, although those tutors tend to work with students for whom free, online prep is borderline irrelevant anyway. Im also aware that most experienced tutors are pushing their students toward the ACT for the foreseeable future. If there was indeed a drop in paid SAT preparation, it was almost certainly  in some part due to students paying for ACT preparation instead.   What interests  me here, however, is the  assumption that  students will be the ones driving the changes. But what if it goes the other way as well? What if it turns out that  tutors  dont want to prepare students for the new SAT? When I chose  not to tutor the new test, I wondered whether I was overreacting. I even felt a bit petty. But then I  talked to an  SAT veteran who has run a popular tutoring centering for several decades. She informed me that when the test changed, she would be closing the center and retiring from test-prep. Another colleague, an award-winning teacher and author with an extraordinary  knowledge of the old SAT, informed me that he had decided to step back from the new test as well and switch, grudgingly, to the ACT. And so another colleague, who had meticulously charted the many problems plaguing the College Board and concluded that she could not be involved with the new exam. She switched to the ACT as well. And yet another colleague, this one far from retirement age, shuttered her SAT prep  business and stopped tutoring entirely. This is not just a local phenomenon either: these colleagues are  located in four states in three very different regions of the country.   A different  set of  colleagues Ive talked to are  nominally tutoring the new exam, but strongly guiding their students toward the ACT whenever possible. They tutor  rSAT as necessary, but with misgivings sometimes very deep misgivings. (One tutor confessed to me that she had  actually started to cry when she looked at it  for the first time.) To be clear, I dont begrudge anyone for  tutoring the new test. Businesses  have to accede to the needs  of their clientele, and changes or not, the SAT will undoubtedly remain entrenched in areas where it has traditionally dominated. Its certainly not reasonable  to expect people to turn away  business  just because they think a test is poorly written. And I have no doubt that some of them are outstanding teachers who will do their utmost to ensure students walk away having learned something of  value. I do, however, wonder  whether the new test will produce a longer-term shift in the  type of people attracted to SAT tutoring and  whether that shift will mirror the shift already occurring in education as a whole. Last winter, when I was interviewed as part of group of tutors for Michael Arlen Daviss documentary  The Test, Michael mentioned that one of his unexpected findings during the course of making the film was that SAT tutoring was such an interesting niche profession, one that attracted people  he genuinely  enjoyed talking to  and bouncing ideas off of. Certainly, the group of us that he interviewed was an exceptionally loquacious one, with some very outsize personalities. We also made it pretty clear to him that we did not suffer faulty reasoning gladly! I think its fair to assume that SAT tutoring has traditionally attracted so many people in that category because the test itself was  interesting  to tutor. Even if a lot of it felt routine after a while, there was always a particularly deviously  constructed question that forced  you not only to think, but to step back and admire the sheer ingeniousness of the test. (Admittedly, this was only possible if you had continuing access to released QAS exams). There  were just  enough curveballs to keep people on their toes, and it was always rewarding to move kids from reading and thinking on a high school-level to something much closer to an adult level. Plenty of long-time tutors stumbled into SAT prep by accident, then got sucked in. That was certainly the case for me. With that kind of cleverness all but absent  from the new exam, a huge component of what made SAT tutoring appealing  has effectively been eliminated. Students may find the test stultifying, but many of them  have no choice but to take it.  Tutors, on the other hand, have no such obligation. And I find it telling that given the option to walk away, some of them are  choosing to  do so. I have no idea whether this is a relatively isolated situation that applies only to a limited  number of people who happen to have the luxury of deciding what they want to teach, or whether its indicative of a larger trend. But I know that I now  hear other private tutors voicing the same kinds of complaints about Common Core drivel that I only used to hear from  people involved in the public school system.   I seriously  wonder whether  as time goes on, fewer of the over-educated, quirky types who often make such outstanding teachers will continue to fall into  SAT tutoring (at least on the verbal side).  If they do somehow end up in test prep, I suspect that they will be  more likely to tutor exams that have some level of adult interest. As a result, SAT students may ultimately be less likely to be taught by tutors  who actually know something about English, and more likely to end up working with people who can only  parrot the College Boards empty jargon  (relevant words! evidence-based reading!), if not outright abuses of language.   One could certainly  make the  argument that reducing the market for expensive  tutoring is an effective means to level the playing field, but looked at the other way around, the situation raises real questions about the quality of the test. After all, if people who could be earning at minimum $100/hour are jumping ship for ethical reasons rather than tutor something as theoretically innocuous as a standardized test, something might not be quite right.