tutoring gets outsourced

The San Francisco Chronicle reports:

Fifth-grader Kevin Chen studies math in his living room in Alameda every week with his tutor, Syeda Nikath Sumaiya -- who works from her home in Seoul.

In the latest incarnation of outsourcing, overseas tutors are teaching U.S. students math, science, English and social studies. And parents are paying half as much as they would for face-to-face instruction.

Via Internet phone, Sumaiya, 27, who works for a Bangalore company, coached the 11-year-old through drills and word problems in her clipped British Indian accent one recent evening. The equations she drew in red materialized on Kevin's screen in Alameda, and he wrote back in blue.

"I think you're carrying twice sometimes," said Sumaiya, an engineer from Bangalore, India, before she moved to South Korea for her husband's job. "Just do it once."

Sumaiya, who communicated with The Chronicle by e-mail, drew a red arrow to point out Kevin's errors, asking aloud, "Do you follow?" and rewarding him with, "That's right," and a big check for a correct answer.

At least a half-dozen tutoring companies operate from India, including two with Bay Area ties: Growing Stars is headquartered in Santa Clara, and TutorVista in Bangalore received $11 million in venture funding from Menlo Park's Sequoia Capital this year.

Online tutoring, which began in the late 1990s, has grown in the past five years, education analysts say, as communication technology improved and became more affordable. It accounts for about 6 percent of the $2.2 billion U.S. private tutoring market, which reached 1.9 million K-12 students last school year, according to Tim Wiley, senior analyst at Eduventures, an education and research consulting firm in Boston.

"You encounter the same natural incentives as manufacturing did in the 1980s, moving factories offshore to lower-priced markets, and what the white-collar sector is going through now," Wiley said. "The dynamics are in place for India-based tutoring companies to really grab a big chunk of the online market."

The bricks and mortar school is about to get big competition.