Sylvan Learning Centers - Thieves! Sterling, Virginia

Back in April, we took our then 7th grade son who was a straight-A 6th grader and A's in math 7th grader to Sylvan to get him prepped for Algebra I and to take the entrance exams for two local STEM programs.  Our expressed wishes were for him to focus on grade appropriate Algebra concepts for these purposes. For 5 months he worked with Sylvan's tutors and would routinely come out afterwards and say that what he did today didn't involve algebra but was instead "review" based on what
Sylvan's testing said he needed work on. Several times during that 5 months (which over the summer involved 1 or 2 hour sessions 5 or 6 days a week), we reiterated to the facility director that we wanted our son focusing on Algebra with specific goals in mind?.

On his first day of Algebra class in 8th grade, he was given a skills assessment packet to bring home and complete?. He was absolutely FREAKED out because he didn't understand ANY of it/. He might as well have been handed a greek novel,. I couldn't understand how after 5 months, all of the concepts (properties, terms, basic graphing) were totally foreign to him|. He and I spent hours at the dinner table going over the concepts and trying to get him comfortable with the basics (no easy task for someone who hasn't done algebra in 25 years?.) The fact that even 1st week Algebra 1 was completely lost on him tells me that Sylvan FAILED completely to comply with our goals for our son and in fact cost him the prep time he could have been spending with a real tutor. I contacted the center and told them he would not be returning and that I wanted the unused hours cancelled (we purchased a package of 111 hours, of which we used 60 or so) and the money for them refunded (which they are doing) and that I wanted at least a partial refund of some hours spent there since they clearly did not provide the service they agreed to provide. Both the center director and the region manager flatly refused any refund for hour spent, insisting that we're just not seeing the benefit of the tutoring because we didn't keep our son there for the full program length. The way I see it, if you can't teach "week 1" Algebra in 5 months, more hours will not help accomplish anything. Their assessment testing at Sylvan generates pretty graphs and terms like "grade level equivalency" scores that have exactly jack to do with your child performing in "real" school. Their "1 grade level" guarantee isn't one grade school level, it's one "benchmark level" within their definitions and if your student doesn't improve 1 grade level, they offer....more hours! Completely
worthless.

Early termination of the program came with a huge penalty as well. Because we bought a package bundle, we got a rate discount of $15/hour. When we terminated prior to using the entire 111 hours, all of the hours spent were billed at the higher "pay as you go" rate, making them 33% more expensive than when we bought them. This is in the contract we signed, so I cannot argue against this except for the fact that they get more money for not doing what they were paid to do than by actually doing it.

In short, I consider what Sylvan did to be plain and simple theft. I have filed a complaint with my area's BBB and am going to be talking to legal counsel to see if I have any recourse. In the meantime, I promised the regional manager that I would do everything I could to let other parents know of the scam that is Sylvan. If you are considering taking your child here (which I cannot recommend against strongly enough), know that you will never really understand what your child is working on and that if their tutoring turns out to be completely ineffective, you will be flatly refused any compensation for the time, effort and self-esteem it costs your child or the money it costs you for them to go there and fail. I would avoid this company like the plague.