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Teenagers trundle through glum Anacostia Senior High School in Washington, D.C., into a pair of clean, well-lit classrooms. The carpet is purple. A road sign in the corner of one room reads, caution: rising self-esteem. Smiling teachers, their lapels decorated with gold attitude pins, greet each student by name. Most teens are here because they long ago fell off the learning curve and faced the prospect of accepting diplomas they could barely read. Some work with teachers, reading simple paragraphs and answering questions. Others play computer vocabulary games. As they learn, the students receive poker-size chips they can trade for Walkmans, CDs, hooded sweat shirts or teddy bears. The scene is a vintage Sylvan Learning Center, the booming as-seen-on-TV franchise specializing in basic-skills tutoring. Once familiar only to suburban malls, the centers have now been transplanted to some of the nation's poorest urban schools. ""These kids are learning things here they should have learned in grade school,'' says Dr. Eugene Williams, the D.C. school official who oversees 504 Sylvan students in four high schools.

This is the newest chapter in the search for private-sector solutions to public-school failure. Unlike the Minneapolis-based Education Alternatives Inc. or the controversial Edison Project devised by Chris Whittle, Sylvan has no interest in taking over entire schools or districts. Instead, the Maryland-based company has found a way to tap into the $7 billion federal Chapter One till -- money targeted for poverty-level students with low achievement records.

It works like this: school systems give Sylvan the Chapter One dollars they receive anyway for remedial education (about $1,100 to $1,500 per child). The private company uses the money to set up its cookie-cutter tutoring room right in the school. Students assigned to take remedial reading or vocabulary-building come to the Sylvan room for one period every day. Children pass the one-credit course when they learn to read at their grade level.

Sylvan likes to think of itself as a one-stop, basic-skills fix-it shop. Schools will hire the company to plug learning gaps just as they hire plumbers to plug pipes. As such, Sylvan hopes to pose no more of a threat to public control of education than the bus companies hired to bring children home or the food services hired to deliver mystery meats and fish sticks. But food and transit are one thing, math and reading quite another.

Sylvan is poised to carve out a hefty slice of what business people refer to as the $300 billion education industry. Sylvan started up 15 years ago with $14,500 and the moxie of a former geography teacher, W. Berry Fowler. Six years later Fowler sold it to a day-care-center business called Kinder-Care for a $5 million profit. By the time two young Baltimore men bought Sylvan in 1991, business was sluggish. President Douglas Becker, 28, and his buddy and CEO, Christopher Hoehn-Saric, 32 -- millionaires themselves from selling their wallet-size medical-history-card business to Blue Cross/Blue Shield – expanded sales from $20 million last year to $40 million this year. Analysts predict another hike next year to more than $60 million. Much of that revenue is expected to come from Sylvan's new venture into computerized testing. The company recently cut a deal with the Educational Testing Service in Princeton, N.J., to offer computer-based tests, including the Graduate Record Exam and the nurses' licensing exam, in many of its centers spread across all 50 states and 170 countries. ""We have significant ambitions,'' says the puckish Becker.

One can make a nice buck as a proctor, but Sylvan's real mother lode may be public education. Baltimore was the first city to hire the company last year. After a year the school system reported that students' math scores jumped by 18 points and reading scores by 1.7 points. The District of Columbia was second to sign last April, followed by rural Dorchester County, Md., and Pasadena, Texas. Becker says an additional 10 to 15 districts are currently engaged in ""serious talks,'' but he declined to name them. Sylvan's school contracts so far total $5 million, serving 2,900 students. ""People are turning to it out of frustration,'' says Felton (Buddy) Johnson, a former Bronx, N.Y., superintendent, now in charge of Sylvan's public-school endeavors. ""Too many children fall through the cracks.''

Sending out for fast-food learning help is often a last-resort measure. In D.C.'s case, test scores showed that only 32 percent of its high-school students read at grade level. Despite decades of remedial ed, officials say seniors are still piling up at the graduation door, unable to sound out basic words or calculate simple equations. Becker pledged that 50 percent of the students would move up two grade levels in reading after 72 hours (or about four months) of training. Of the first 50 students tested, 40 rose two grade levels. ""We have to convince them they are not dumb because they can't read,'' says Barbara Spada, Sylvan's area coordinator for D.C. schools. ""They have what we call skill gaps. We can fix them.''

There is nothing magical about Sylvan's method. A battery of diagnostic tests determines what each student needs to work on. Teachers prepare customized curricula that consist of reading workbook paragraphs, answering questions, taking tests and moving on to the next level. Perhaps the most important difference is that there is one teacher for every three kids. ""These teachers talk to you and pay attention,'' says William Young, 16, playing a vocabulary bowling game on his computer at Anacostia. Students receive lots of kudos in the form of praise and goodies from the Sylvan Store in the classroom corner.

So what's not to like? Author Alfie Kohn says practically everything, if it's based on bribing kids to read. In his 1993 book ""Punished by Rewards,'' Kohn cites 30 years of research showing that the more people are rewarded for completing a task, the more they lose interest in that task in the long run. ""A child who is motivated to read in order to get a candy bar or a toy is a child who is less likely to pick up a difficult book to read, and less likely to continue to read down the road,'' says Kohn. ""Kids say to themselves, "If they have to bribe me to do it, it must be something I don't want to do on my own'.''

Becker argues that nearly every teacher in the nation uses some kind of reward system in the classroom. ""It gets kids to the table.'' But that's precisely the problem, says Kohn -- it's an unquestioned practice with a long failing history. In fact, he writes, the first public school in 19th-century New York City used a ""token economy'' system: well-behaved students received tickets redeemable for toys. ""It was eventually abandoned,'' writes Kohn, ""because, in the view of the school's trustees, the use of rewards "fostered a mercenary spirit'.''

But the students at Anacostia see it differently. ""This is just something nice to let us know the teachers appreciate us,'' says Aaron Clifton, a 16-year-old sophomore, searching the shelves for a Big Mike CD. In any case, ""I still want to know how to read.''

Sylvan is off and teaching, but some educators wonder what this parceling out to businesses will mean for schools. ""We have to be very careful what we are creating,'' says Keith Geiger, president of the National Education Association, the nation's largest teachers union. In 10 years, will we have Berlitz teaching German, Sylvan teaching math, McDonald's catering the lunchroom? If the kids are learning, will that be so bad?

Lynnell Hancock

/ Newsweek, Dec 19, 1994/

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