I think the system from Mathnasium is extremely good. My son attended Mathnasium in California for…read morea few years, and then we continued in St Louis. Unfortunately, the centers in St Louis are incredibly badly operated with almost no concern for the students or parents, in sharp contrast with my prior experiences and I wish the brand did a quality control of their franchises. I finally decided that we would quit after repeated issues of quality and normal standards of care, which is very bad for us because we loved the system. I will share below a subset of problems we had to deal with.
Over the few years we attended the Ladue center, because their policy is to severely underpay their staff, almost all of the good instructors started leaving, replaced by nice but not nearly as motivated as the task would require. The center has kept telling us for many years that they are 'trying to hire' but obviously what they are ready to offer is completely insufficient for what a good tutor should earn. For $299 per month, we would hope that tutor would earn a decent compensation for tutoring a group of student but this is not the case. In fact, we had some great tutors when we joined and they all left because, as is now becoming all too common in other businesses, the center is offering unsustainable conditions that are only viable as a side gig.
Because of this, we noticed that the center does not have the bandwidth to correctly track progress across grades, with severe missing topics that we discovered were not done well in the school assessments or tests. The reason for this is that the staff has almost no time to review what progress has been made in a manner that is customized to where a student is. I was appalled to see our son was not doing better than many students, and all students with other tutors did much, much better. The system works, but not if it's administered in a standardized manner to all but tutors who come and go.
To add to these issues, but related, the center has implemented a taxing reservation system where appointments have to be reserved months in advance to have a decent spot. They close on one day of the week plus one day of the week-end, removing two more days which would be ideal for families and forcing kids to do their session after school. It is not unusual that one has to pick up a 6:30pm session. If we call them to reschedule, they will not answer the phone and send to an answering service that has to call back. The center main director Caitlin has no interest in resolving anything and, when confronted with repeated problems, just kept saying that she was sorry we felt this way and this was their policy, and that it was normal to make appointments. Certainly it is the prerogative of a business to manage their policies in any way they see fit, but this is irrelevant to the point I am raising that this business is only interested in making profits without any concern about the issues of parents and kids, in order to reduce quality to save on operating expenses. But I do not want to suggest any issue due to her, as I suspect she is like other employees being given no reasonable resources by the franchise owners to do a good job to resolve the issues that she uncovers.
I called the main center and I hope there can be more quality control of the franchises, as I am not sure this is not the right image for the brand. In summary, I remain a great fan of Mathnasium, but unfortunately, if you would like good quality tutoring here in St Louis, a tutor will be more effective. I shared my concerns with other parents here in the area, and found that most of them did know about Mathnasium and dropped out for similar related reasons.