SCORE! Educational Centers
| File:Score logo.gif | |
| Company type | Subsidiary of the Washington Post Company |
|---|---|
| Industry | Service |
| Founded | Palo Alto, California, (1992) |
| Headquarters | Chicago, Illinois, USA |
Key people | Alan Tripp, Founder Justin Serrano, President |
| Products | Specialized education services |
| Revenue |  $71.5 million USD (2004) |
Number of employees | Less than 2,000 |
| Website | www.escore.com |
SCORE! Educational Centers (commonly SCORE!), a division of Kaplan Inc., which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Washington Post Company, is a United States provider of customized supplementary computer-based education and one-on-one tutoring services for children in kindergarten through tenth grade. SCORE! offers materials in multiple subjects, including reading, math, spelling, language arts, science, keyboarding, and writing.
SCORE! has over 165 centers in twelve states, including California, Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Virginia, and also in the District of Columbia.
Method of teaching
Each student typically comes to SCORE! twice a week for an hour at a time. Students complete five ten-minute computer lessons each hour with short breaks in between.
SCORE! uses adaptive software developed by the Computer Curriculum Corporation (CCC) as the core of its program (some centers also offer more intensive tutoring at a 3 to 1 ratio). The software is initially set at an appropriate grade level determined by the parents and directors and will begin giving the student questions at that level. If the student performs well, the software will raise the student's level to make the questions more challenging. Conversely, if the student is doing poorly, the software will lower the student's level to make the questions easier. The difficulty level provides a way to measure the student's progress.
| Climber Name | Steps |
|---|---|
| Countdown | 30 |
| Bronze | 30 |
| Silver | 60 |
| Gold | 90 |
| All-Star | 120 |
| Triathlon | 132 |
| Founder's | 180 |
| After Founder's, climbers vary from center to center. |
|
The software attempts to find a level where student proficiency is 85%. At this level, the student is presented enough new material so that they learn, but not so much that they become overwhelmed and frustrated by the number of unfamiliar problems. In this manner, the students learn new material while reinforcing old material. Once the student has reached this 85% level, usually after a one-month initial placement period, the software progressively advances the student's levels, typically completing two month's school work in one month's time.
The software is complemented by the student's interaction with academic coaches and directors. If a student has trouble with a question, he can raise his hand and ask a question to the center employees. The staff will help the student as much as possible without giving away the answer. Instead, the employees let the student figure out the solution, which creates a positive atmosphere and encourages the student to understand that they can learn and discover things on their own. Employees take notes on the back of the student's grade sheet, indicating areas in which the student had trouble so that parents can help in the learning process at home.
Each center has a model mountain which students use to gauge their progress. Following the initial placement period, the center directors and the student's parents choose a subject area in which the student needs the most work. As the student completes lessons in that topic, his climber will move up the mountain. When the climber reaches the top of the mountain, the entire center is notified, and the student has a celebration. The student is given a new climber and sometimes a new goal subject. The new climber must complete more steps than the previous climber in order to reach the top of the mountain. The table on the right lists climbers and number of steps for each.
Positive reinforcement
SCORE!, like most after-school education programs, lacks traditional abilities to enforce disciplinary measures.
Instead, SCORE! employs a method of positive reinforcement to maintain discipline. SCORE! cards, small magnetic squares emblazoned with the SCORE! logo, pictured at right, are used as incentives. These cards can be redeemed for prizes and can be earned for scoring over 70% on a lesson or making basketball shots. Since students spend most of their time at the computer, basketball shots are used as a method of breaking up the lessons and getting out student's active energy. Shots are awarded for doing well on lessons or completing a full hour of lessons. High fives are used to encourage students and are a strong part of the corporate culture.
While positive reinforcement usually works well in motivating students, disciplinary problems sometimes occur. SCORE! is viewed by many students as a non-essential part of their education, and some students do not respect SCORE! employees as authority figures. Although many students respect academic coaches because the coaches are at an age that the students would like to be at themselves, academic coaches are generally younger than typical disciplinary figures, including parents. Overall, SCORE! employees have limited disciplinary recourse in comparison to the public school system, where options include sending students to the principal's office and giving detentions.
Criticisms of SCORE!
Detractors list multiple criticisms of SCORE! Educational Centers, among them:
- SCORE! lacks traditional abilities to enforce discipline, for reasons mentioned above, sometimes leading to disciplinary problems.
- SCORE!, on the whole, employs mostly persons who have no previous experience or professional training in education. This leads to occasional difficulties communicating concepts, as employees lack the training gained by obtaining a teaching degree or certificate.
- For some students, the cost of SCORE! outweighs the benefits. One of the main objections of many interested parents is the prohibitively high cost of SCORE!.
- Often, the high volume of students and the resulting poor student-teacher ratios can cause some students to be forgotten in the rush of the center, both on a daily basis and overall.
- SCORE! seeks to create role model relationships between students and employees. However, high employee turnover makes it difficult for students to bond with coaches and directors. It also becomes difficult to create a personal look and feel at each center, because the entire staff may cycle out every three years or less.
Center employees
Each center employs one center director, two other directors, and a staff of four to ten academic coaches. Each region, comprised of all the centers in a metropolitan area, also has a Regional Manager.
Directors
Directors are in charge of recruiting new members, managing old members, tracking and adjusting academic progress, and managing academic coaches. These jobs are divided among all three directors. All three directors are also responsible for community advertising of their center. In addition, center directors must manage the other directors at their center and attend regular meetings with the Regional Manager and other center directors from the region. Directors are typically recent college graduates, and many only stay in the company for a few years before moving to another job. The wide spectrum of responsibilities represents a massive time commitment and can be very taxing on some directors.
Academic coaches (ACs)
Typically, academic coaches are high school or college students who treat the position as a part time job. Coaches are selected based on a combination of their tutoring ability, personal knowledge, and general attitude.
While a coach's primary role is to help in the education process, academic coaches are also responsible for center maintenance, relaying parents' concerns to directors, conflict resolution, and responding to walk-by inquiries about the program. High employee turnover and the part time nature of the job leads to the necessity to have many more coaches on the staff than may actually be required to fill the schedule in a given week. Because there are many new hires and directors are constantly involved with members, senior coaches are largely responsible for training new coaches.
An academic coach is responsible for many tasks aside from tutoring. If the center were to hire one person to do each job that a coach performs, a conservative estimate of the average equivalent hourly pay is US$9.50 an hour, using figures from careerbuilder.com. However, academic coaches start at $6.25 an hour ($6.75 in California). Coaches can gain promotions based on their performance, earning another $.25 per hour for each promotion. College graduates can earn a maximum of $8.50 in the academic coach position.
History
Alan Tripp, a graduate of Stanford University, opened the first SCORE! Educational Center in Palo Alto, California, in November 1992. SCORE!'s early success was attributed largely to their use of the CCC adaptive software. In 1996, CCC decided not to sign an exclusive licensing agreement with SCORE! and instead awarded licensing to Kaplan. This limited SCORE!'s ability to expand, as the initial deal only allowed Tripp to expand to eight more centers. In order to bypass this limit, on 17 April, 1996, Kaplan acquired SCORE! in a deal worth less than $10 million USD. The company has now expanded to over 150 locations in twelve states.