Tutor restoration: Test-prep firms like The Princeton Review are invading America's grade schools. This is: a) good. b) bad.

• Author: Gorman, Siobhan

IN A COUNTRY WHERE HIGH SCHOOL KIDS of every stripe seem to favor the same uniforms of baggy pants or midriff-baring shirts, it can be hard to spot differences in class background. But one giveaway for juniors and seniors lies in the contents of their backpacks--there's a good chance that the more affluent will be toting test-prep materials from companies like Kaplan and Princeton Review. These are the top firms that teach courses designed to give kids a leg up on those all-important college-entrance exams, the SAT and ACT, as well as graduate school equivalents like the GMAT and LSAT. Such programs have long been controversial because, at $1,000 per 12-session course, they provide children of the affluent yet another unfair advantage in life, teaching them how to game the tests that largely determine admission to selective colleges and universities--tests that are themselves of dubious intellectual value.

Now, after years of exacerbating class differences among the college-bound, test-prep companies are expanding their offerings downward to cover children as young as six. The reason is the testing mania spawned by the school reform movement. In the 1990s, outraged by the low quality of so many public schools, many states, encouraged by Washington, imposed rigorous tests that students must pass before they can advance to the next grade. Sensing an opportunity, companies like Kaplan Inc. began developing prep courses for those tests and marketing them to the anxious parents of K-through-12 students. This fever peaked last year with the passage of President Bush's No Child Left Behind Act, which requires such tests for every public school student in America in grades three through eight by 2006. Schools failing to meet annual test score standards for three straight years risk being shut down or reconstituted with new teachers, and their students must be offered private tutoring vouchers paid for by the federal government. Unsurprisingly, test-prep companies see the law, and especially its provision for federal tutoring vouchers, as a vast new opportunity. "The market for test prep is on fire," says Amy Wilkins, a senior analyst at the Education Trust.

To see these courses at work, I recently visited Kaplan's Score! Educational Center in Alexandria, Va. Sandwiched between a Whole Foods Market and a Starbucks in a typical suburban strip mall, the center was teeming with eager grade-schoolers, some of them fresh from soccer practice in red jerseys and cleats. Academic competitiveness was already in full bloom. "I want to be ahead of people, not behind them," announced one of the young soccer players, Kayvon Naghdi, who can recite by heart his score on the Virginia Standards of Learning test. Said Jessica Peraertz, proud mother of eight-year-old Isabella, "I think [Kaplan] has actually made her be ahead of other kids in her class" As students stationed themselves before computers for a two-hour tutoring class, parents hovered nearby monitoring their children's progress or ducked out to grab a latte. The one constant was that they seemed every bit as determined for their child to excel as those of older students eyeing Yale and Harvard. Critics of high-stakes tests are up in arms against this creeping obsession. "There is this testing bandwagon momentum that is really getting out of hand," says Arnold F. Fege, president of Public Advocacy for Kids and a longtime activist...