Complaint Review: Academic Advantage

 I tutored for Academic Advantage for three months.  Their training advertises "Learning with Laptops" but I was called in to do paper-based tutoring for 3 students for English.  Because it was late in the term, I was asked to start sessions immediately, even though the paper-based materials were not immediately provided.  In general, one is to do a screening test before tutoring, but the lack of the paper tests and the constrained timetable made it necessary to start tutoring before the test.  It took three weeks to find out how to print out the tests and then over another week to get approval on the training priorities. 

At that point, one student was taken from me with the explanation that his mother had requested it. She had not.  However, Academic Advantage said it was too late to reassign him back to me... although only two days had elapsed since he had been re-assigned. NOTE:  He did not ever have a post-test recorded, so I suspect that no tutor was ever actually re-assigned. END NOTE.    I continued with the two other students. and later was assigned another student, this time for math, who was an 8th grader with 1st year arithmetic skills, obviously struggling with Algebra.

When no pay was deposited in the AA-issued debit card - and no accounting provided - I was told that there were problems because of my tutoring prior to testing, but someone was working on it.  The second month got the same response, and requests for clarification on submitted forms.  After the final session in the third month, there was more confusion over the form of certain responses, and smudged initials from the parents.  One problem was that the form required had room for 13 characters, but they wanted a "legible" full sentence response.  They finally agreed to a supplemental sheet, which I provided. 

Finally, they deposited a total of $547 of the $1,787.50 billed for 87.5 hours billed, plus a completion bonus of $50, and an allowance of $75 for fingerprinting.  There was never an emailed or mailed accounting.  The Garden Grove school district said that it was powerless to act; the State of California Board of Education said that it could only apply "moral suasion,"  which proved to be of no avail.

If I must choose between less than minimum wage and pure volunteerism, I choose the latter.  I also do not wish the US Government to be paying some premium to Academic Advantage for unpaid tutoring. ###