The NY Times' Susan Saulny turns in an interesting story this morning on the trend in homeschooling whereby parents hire teachers to actually oversee the whole teaching and learning thing. Sounds a little like Mary Poppins meets Jaime Escalante.

The whole tutoring industry has been getting a lot of attention since the federal No Child Left Behind law started allocating a portion of Title I money for students in failing schools to use for free tutoring afterschool. But this article shows that the real money behind this booming industry is still coming from people who are privately paying $100 per hour and more to provide one-on-one educational services to children.

My experience is that it's not just home-schoolers. In fact, many people who send their kids to school during the day still feel a need to hire tutors to teach them everything they really need to know to perform well on tests that will help them get into decent public middle and high schools. At a PTA meeting at Manhattan's PS 41 last fall, for example, every single parent at the meeting indicated they were paying out-of-pocket for some sort of tutoring after school. My own son, at nearby PS 11, once asked my wife and I why we hadn't hired a tutor for him, because so many of his friends were in on the tutoring action.

Does all this tutoring take the heat off our schools to get the job done in the few hours they have with our kids each day?