TutorFind

I was exploring the possibility of joining tutorfind.com when I turned up some wacky unexplained things. Then I discovered what seems to be the most likely explanations for those things. I've been a tutor on and off for 12 years and I have over 1000 tutoring hours with clients, and I am sick of being treated like garbage by these types of people. Stay away from tutorfind.com and be very wary of the American Tutoring Association (ATA) until you understand more about their relationship to each other and to CER, LLC. After clicking on the web site's "Be a TutorFind Tutor" button, I read that all TutorFind tutors must be certified by the ATA and the company will help me process my certification. For a tutor/student matching service or a tutoring agency to absolutely require all its tutors to be certified seemed strange, but for it to require all its tutors to have one and only one type of certification seemed downright bizarre. A college professor or a 20-year veteran of a great school district would not be able to join tutorfind.com as a tutor without ATA certification, so I headed over to the ATA site at www.americantutoringassociation.org and read about that organization. For a one-time fee of $95 and a recurring fee of $65/year, the ATA would provide me with a background check of myself (a useful thing for a tutor to have) and several useless things--for me at least--like verifying my own references and confirming that I have a Bachelor's Degree or the equivalent. How much of my fee would go into the background check? Probably less than $10. Where would the rest of my certification fee go? The ATA is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, so chances are that nobody is getting rich off of those outlandish and unreasonable certification fees, but that money must be going somewhere. Now for a question to ponder later: Is it still perfectly legal for non-profits to compensate their board members with high salaries? Now imagine you'd never heard of tutorfind and go ahead and search for tutors at the non-profit ATA's web page at http://www.americantutoringassociation.org/index.php?action=search and which tutors do you find over and over? I find nearly all of them are tutors at the for-profit tutorfind.com. How and why does the ATA care so much about TutorFind? Back at tutorfind.com, I was trying to figure out some details about their organization from a tutor's perspective. Namely, how do funds get transferred from the client to the company and from the company to me, and who pays how much for what and when. Before being provided with answers to some of my most basic questions, I was presented with an independent contractor agreement between myself and an entity called "CER, LLC." Who the hell is "CER, LLC" and why are they expecting me to agree to anything when I know so little about everything? How dare tutorfind treat potential tutors in this shabby and disgusting way by asking us to agree to terms and rates that we don't know with a limited liability corporation we've never heard of? How can they get away with this in 2011? And the contract has one bizarre clause: "Occasionally, TutorFind will pay for all costs associated with ATA Certification. In these cases tutor agrees to give TutorFind two hours of tutoring at no charge." What? How and why does TutorFind care so much about ATA? What's tutorfind.com like from the client's perspective? Try it and see. Eventually, you'll receive a list of possible tutors in your area that tutor the subject you want, and you're asked to click a link to "Schedule Work With This Tutor" and enter how many hours you want to buy BEFORE knowing how much each tutor charges! Eventually, you reach a payment screen with the statement: "A one time $95.00 Registration Fee will be charged to new clients prior to the first tutoring sessison. [sic]" Strange... a one time fee of $95 for doing almost nothing... that sounds familiar... One possible answer to these mysteries is at http://www.americantutoringassociation.org/?action=meet_board. The first board member and a founding member of the ATA also founded TutorFind. She must like the number 95. After all, her non-profit charges tutors $95 in return for doing almost nothing except directing potential customers to her for-profit that charges clients $95 in return for doing almost nothing. If I were her, I'd like the number 95 too.