Does Anyone Have Any Expericnce Or Knowledge With Sylvan Lea

They did not deliver.

1. My son had a different teacher every time he went. There was no continuity. This resulted in no one actually knowing how he was doing

2. 2 months several thousand dollars later and they will still working on him writing his name even though at home he could do it

3. All they did was hand out worksheets and give out trinkets. My son loved the trinkets.

Get a tutor familar with lindamood bell or do phongraphix yourself. Phonographix worked for my son but I am going to start lindamood bell to help his visualization which I believe will improve his writing.

Check out the policy there carefully. In our town the “progress guarantee” is null and void for students who already have some type of sped label on them.

I worked with a Huntingdon center, which is a direct competitor/clone of Sylvan, for a few months, and I applied to work and looked at a Sylvan operation.
All comments below are generic; some centers may be more responsible. However, for profit-making centers in general, this is the setup:

(1) There is a lovely curriculum on paper, and teachers are required to watch videotapes and take a little test when hired. Then in the actual operation, this curriculum is essentially ignored.
The program consists of “more of the same” — photocopy a worksheet, hand it to the student, collect it, mark it, hand it back again, and continue ad infinitum with the workshets on the list. This may possibly sometimes help a child who just needs more practice and fast feedback, but the amount of actual teaching is minimal (see below).

(2) The system is three students to one teacher. The teacher spends most of the time running around finding, copying, and marking the worksheets, and doesn’t have time to teach even if she wants to or knows how.

(3) In theory, students and teachers are assigned to each other for a good long-term teaching relationship; in practice, there are constant changes especially as staffing is kept to a minimum for maximization of profit.

(4) The centers insist on hiring locally certified teachers. This sounds good in theory. In practice, it means that the same people who failed to teach your kid during the day are there after school hours doing exactly the same things. And they are tired and just trying to make a few extra bucks. Also it means that immigrant PhD’s with all sorts of knowledge and abilities and experience can’t get a foot in the door, while semi-literate kids straight out of the local college with zero teaching skills are welcome (and even more so since they’re cheap.)

(5) The following are prices from ten years ago — add ten to twenty percent for inflation — but the pattern is the same or worse.
The center charged $35. per hour per child. A few were taken individually, and there were a few absences, so assume 2.5 students to one teracher — that’s an income of $87.50 per hour per table. The teacher, on the ohter hand, was paid only *$8.00* per hour.
Let’s be reasonable; there’s overhead such as rent and heat and light and administrator’s salary and books and photocopier paper and all that. But even if you assume a pretty high value, say $10. per child per hour overhead, or $25.00 per teacher, that still leaves $54. per teacher per hour for profit and advertising. Those fancy TV ads are expensive of course, but still a heck of a lot must be going into the profit.

(6) The “guarantee of success” which I never saw in action myself, I was told by other teachers was based on the center’s own tests. So if they give slightly biased tests, the first one tending to score low and the second one tending high, gee, everyone succeeds. Even if they don’t do that, well, over an average year there will be some progress with most kids because of maturing and other experiences, plus nmormal variation up and down in test scores, and if even half the kids do OK, the center still has a profit margin.

We told them our concerns, and asked them to test him - and (I realize about 10 years later) they tested him for the wrong things - then wanted to charge us a ton of money to teach him the wrong skills. Fortunately we knew that what they wanted to teach him wasn’t what he needed!

What is lindamood bell?

They have some excellent reading comprehension software. I don’t think they are decoding specialists, generally. You might find a decoding person buried in an office somewhere, but that’s a needle/haystack.

The phonics are more “embedded” in the contextual reading…Not enough practice for LD kids w/decoding issues.

Never let your common sense at home when out shopping for reading programs or anything else.

These centers or any others should not make promises but it’s in the nature of advertising to do so. Those promises get us in the door and our hopes get us to sign on the dotted line…

The reasons that children don’t read at grade level do vary from child to child. There is no one reading program that works for all children. Learning centers offer easy access for parents who need tutoring help for their children. Rather than needing to scout around and find a tutor, learning centers serve that need.

Remember that learning centers are staffed usually by part timers. Moonlighting teachers go to learning centers to make some extra money. You can get a good tutor at a learning center or a bad one. There’s no guanrantee of a good tutor or much else except the learning centers abound and are easy to locate.

Consider asking around a bit. Perhaps a neighbor or a friend used a tutor they thought was good. If your child does not read up to grade level, try if you can to spend 20 minutes a day reading outloud to your child. That alone can help.

Good luck

Lindamood Bell is a program that teaches good phonemic awareness. Phonographix also does this. Both programs actually are based on the same research. Theses programs are both research driven. This is important because there really is substantial information out there about what works and what doesn’t work. Unfortunately some school systems do not base their teaching methods on actual research.

If you are looking for a tutor you can try to find someone who is an official lindamood bell tutor at this site www.lindamoodbell.com. I actually spoke to a them the other day for about an hour and they were very helpful. Don’t be too discouraged if you can’t find and official LMB tutor there are plenty who have been trained in the technique who are not affiliated with LMB directly. I would contact a school that serves learning disabled children in your area. They can usually point you to a good tutor that is specially trained in techniques that work. Some also like Orton Gillingham but I am not really familiar with this method.

If you want to try to teach phonemic awareness yourself get the book reading reflex (this is phonographix) from Amazon. It really is a pretty straight forward program to teach. It really helped my son and many on here have had very good success with it.

Our neighbor’s child went to a Sylvan center with very good results. They taught him to read to grade level when he did not learn in first grade. BUT, and this is a very big BUT—he is not LD. They have had him extensively tested, when he continued to have issues at school, and there is no sign of a learning disability. It seems to be more immaturity than anything else and those issues did not go away with Sylvan. He is now repeating third grade with good results.

I would never send my LD son there.

Beth

I agree wholeheartedly with the comments I have read. Our daughter went to one for a short time and it was a complete waste and highly frustrating. It was very chaotic, we never knew who our teacher would be or what exactly she would be working on, or who would be grouped with her at her sessions. Not only would I not recommend this for an LD child, I wouldn’t even recommend it for a child who just needs extra work. You would get more for your money from a private tutor who can focus on your child alone, or with a group that is consistent from day to day. At least then you would have some control over who he or she would be grouped with.

Hi Nancy,
I don’t know anything about Sylvan, but I took my son to Score during the summer (it’s a computerized division of Sylvan).

In Score, regardless of the deficit, children work on reading and math.

My overall feeling is that the program was okay for my son, but did nothing directly to help with his reading. One interesting thing I learned was that during the reading portion my son did fairly well when he was going through the section that incorportated auditory help, but when he graduated to the level where he had to read it himself, his progress began to slow down considerably. The program is not designed for a child with a reading disability, so it could not fully help my son.

Now the one thing I felt it did help with was math. My son doesn’t have any problems with math so he was able to work ahead and this was really nice. I spend soooo much time working on reading with him it was nice that he could get some “outside of school” math enrichment.

I think these types of programs are best for non-LD kids and a program like Score (which I thought was fairly good) is really best for kids who want to work ahead. A friend of mine whose son is highly gifted in math brought her 4th grader to score so he could work on 10th grade math!!! She was pleased with the program.