Streamline Learning
Opening Doors to Elite Colleges
Our Secret? Unlocking Brilliance.
“Streamline propels any student the ability to drastically improve their ACT or SAT scores.”
— BRYN MAWR PARENT
“Streamline provided the tools and confidence to allow my son to rapidly achieve measurably improved ACT results.”
— GILMAN PARENT
STREAMLINE IN THE NEWS
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Join Our Waitlist
Our Brilliance Buddies are highly sought after and have busy schedules. We prioritize referrals, so please be sure to let us know who referred you in our enrollment form. We typically have openings every score release dates, so please fill out our enrollment form and the Native Brilliance Assessment as early as possible, so we can align our schedule with your chilld’s.
Streamline Learning
How to Stand Out?Sidestep the Rat Race.
In a test-optional world, most high school students stress about their GPA and college application essays. Meanwhile, rampant grade inflation, ChatGPT, and the now massive private essay coach market have made high GPAs and thoughtful college essays commonplace. Refusing to follow the crowd is a scary prospect, but when you work with Streamline, your child has an experienced guide to help them tackle the unknown.
Elite SAT/ACT Scores
Unlike GPA, SAT and ACT scores are used to determine a college’s ranking in the US News & World Report. Applying with an elite score helps colleges maintain their ranking.
Intellectual identity
Applicants with unique intellectual identities are easy for admissions officers to remember. Students who pursue their intellectual passions outside of school give their teachers the opportunity to write more persuasive letters of recommendation.
Brilliance
Most students are too stressed by living up to standards in school to focus on their own personal development. When students learn to love learning for its own sake, they shine. They’re self-aware. And they become THAT KID, whom everyone knows will get into a good college (and they do!).
Streamline Learning
Our Services
Our services are grounded in the philosophy captured in CEO Ian Siegel’s book, School Sucks, Your Child Doesn’t: The Secret to Unlocking Your Child’s Untapped Potential.
SAT Prep & ACT Prep
Native Brilliance Coaching (Coming Soon!)
Streamline Learning
Our Students
We work with high potential students. Based on our experience, there are direct indicators of high potential students and indirect indicators. Twelve years of experience have helped us map out the relationship between brilliance, learning/psych challenges, and specific behavior patterns caused by stress. Through this process, we’ve discovered that children are already brilliant deep down. Unlocking that brilliance isn’t some magic trick; it’s about deeply understanding what we call a student’s Stress Monster and capitalizing on the latest in psychology and brain health to give your child room to think. Learn more about you can help.
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Where Brilliance Meets Results
Where Our Students Attend High School
Maryland
- McDonogh
- Gilman
- Park School
- Bryn Mawr School
- Roland Park Country School
- Loyola Blakefield
- Calvert Hall
- Friends School of Baltimore
- Notre Dame Prep
- Boys Latin School
- St. Paul’s School
- Odyssey School
- Pikesville High School
- Dulaney High School
- Mercersburg Academy
DMV
- Maret School
- St. Anselm’s School
- Gonzaga
- Endmund Burke School
- St. Alban’s School
- Visitation School
- Bullis School
- Georgetown Prep
California
- The Athenian School
- Menlo School
- Los Altos High School
Florida
- Naples Community School
- Fort Myers High School
- Pinecrest School
United Kingdom
- Eton College
What Streamline Parents Are Saying
“Streamline propels any student the ability to drastically improve their ACT or SAT scores. Once a specific plan has been designed by Streamline’s professional educators, students who stay dedicated and work hard will clearly see major improvements. Streamline has a very low-key approach but a very specific plan for each student. We highly suggest contacting Streamline well in advance to set up a schedule at least 6 months prior to taking any standardized testing. It is true, the more guidance and practice you embark on, the higher your scores will be!”
McDonogh Parent
Gilman parent
menlo parent
Where Our Students Attend College
Ivies
- Harvard
- Yale
- Princeton
- Cornell
- Dartmouth
- Columbia
- UPenn
Basically Ivy
- Stanford
- Vanderbilt
- MIT
- WashU
- Tufts
- UVA
- Duke
- Johns Hopkins
- UC Berkeley
- UCLA
- Georgetown
- UNC
- University of Southern California
Very Selective
- University of Michigan
- Boston College
- Boston University
- University of Maryland
- UT Austin
- Georgia Institute of Technology
Liberal Arts Colleges
- Amherst
- Williams
- Bowdoin
- Bates
- Davidson
- Barnard
- Swarthmore
- Colgate
- Vassar
- Us Naval Academy
Teachers
Teachers know the content they’re teaching but rarely are able to deeply know each student. Children are constantly changing, but because teachers must focus on classroom management, they aren’t in a position to learn about your student. For teachers, brilliance is a static idea. They label students in their minds, and your child’s future becomes predetermined by teachers’ perception of your child.
Why We’re So Successful
We’re not teachers. We’re not tutors. We’re Brilliance Buddies.
Brilliance Buddies
With over a decade of experience in the test prep world, we understand that unlocking our students’ brilliance involves focusing on our own development as Brilliance Buddies for your child. If your student is struggling to learn, we don’t just point out what your student is missing. We focus on what we’re missing about your student that is keeping them from learning. And this typically boils down to your child’s psychology around learning and the limiting beliefs they have about themselves. As Brilliance Buddies, we help students see themselves for who they are deep down: brilliant.
Tutors
Tutors generally fail to take advantage of the 1-on-1 relationship with their students. Educated in school, tutors neglect the opportunity to deeply learn about students. Test prep is high stakes, so test prep tutors tend to get defensive when students struggle to improve. They blame students for not improving, rather than looking in the mirror and considering what they could do better to help their students learn.
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Virtually Brilliant
When you compare virtual school and virtual 1-on-1 coaching, it’s helpful to think of each mode of learning as a different technology. Virtual school is a virtual horse and buggy. Working virtually with one of our Brilliance Buddies over Zoom is virtually like flying in a private jet.
Choose Your Path to College.
If you’re like most of our clients, you’ve observed flashes of brilliance in your child. This experience leads parents to call their children “bright” or “very bright.” But what about brilliant? In our experience, the difference between bright and brilliant is the experiences children have early on, when their brains are changing at a rapid rate. We find that stressors at school tend to dim our students’ brilliance, slowing their pace of learning. Our Brilliance Buddies, on the other hand, are experts at taking your child’s training wheels off and bringing your child’s brilliance back.
Training Wheels at School
Bad Data
College counselors use students’ PSAT or PACT score to recommend whether students should pursue test prep or settle on a list of colleges that “really are test optional.” Good starting scores result from a positive mindset around test-taking, strong reading abilities, and authentically challenging in school. Typically we find that students’ experience in school is what causes them to start out as bad test takers.
Conflict of Interest
Just like it’s hard to get your child in the appropriately challenging course schedule because of institutional limitations, it’s hard to make sure your child gets into the appropriately challenging college while taking college counselors’ advice at face value. While managing an entire class of college applicants, counselors are more focused on avoiding disappointment than advising families to take calculated risks. That’s why they simultaneously downplay the importance of the SAT or ACT and provide families with college lists that are dominated by safety schools.
Connection
In a classroom setting, your peers may be your friends, but when it comes to college admissions, they’re also your competition. Meanwhile, your teachers act as gatekeepers of good grades. In this situation, students are motivated to hide what they don’t know and define who they are by what they’re good at relative to their peers. This insecure state makes it difficult for students to learn at their pace, because most of their brain power is directed toward judging themselves.
Brain Power
Damning public health realities about school are beginning to surface, and the impact on your child’s brain health and brain power should not be ignored. In our quest to understand what’s interfering with your child’s brilliance, we’ve learned that the primary impediment is the air they’re breathing at school. The neuro-inflammation many students experience because of chronic exposure to chemicals and microbial toxins sets children’s brains on fire, which makes it hard to learn. Learn more about this important reality here.
“Success”
When parents pay for private school, they start out expecting the investment to expand what’s possible for their child. This expectation typically lasts until their child receives their first PSAT score, at which point those expectations get a gut check. Because parents assume schools understand what counts in education, they begrudgingly accept that their child may not have as much potential as they thought. In fact, parents may even get the impression from school that their child being “a bad test taker” is their fault.
No Speed Limit at Streamline
Actionable Data
Instead of telling parents the limits of what their children are capable of achieving, we use a cognitive assessment developed at UPenn to determine students’ potential on the test. According to our data, 100% of our students start out scoring below their cognitive potential on the PSAT, often by hundreds of points. By deeply understanding your child’s cognitive strengths, we turn potential to brilliance on the SAT and ACT.
Collaboration of Interest
Based on our experience, studying your child’s brilliance is the best way to unlock our own as Brilliance Buddies. Instead of using your child’s pyschological challenges or learning difficulties as an excuse for failure, we use them as windows into what makes your kid brilliant. Learn more by checking out our proprietary Native Brilliance Assessment.
Connection
When you feel connected to your tutor or your college campus, you feel connected within. Typically, bright students are stuck in cycles of self-judgment. Connection is the key to getting that Inner Judge to stop working against your child and start working for them instead.
Brain Power
At college and in 1-on-1 learning relationships, learning happens through osmosis. Just like your peers at college, your Brilliance Buddy at Streamline should be brilliant. And for us that means two things: knowing the test and knowing your child. Along these lines, we judge our success not just by outsized score improvements. What’s most important is that we consistently get your child into Flow State, which for your child feels like we’re reading their mind.
Success
Learning at school tends to be an ironic enterprise from our perspective at Streamline. But one reality that’s especially ironic is the way public schools and private schools interpret the results of standardized tests. At public schools, teachers are judged by the success of their students on standardized tests. At private school, if a student does poorly, college counselors settle on the idea that your child is a bad test taker and claim standardized testing is evil because it forces teachers to “teach to the test.” At Streamline, we know your child enough to know college counselors have no idea what they’re talking about. The reality is effective standardized testing prep forces educators to deeply understand your child’s brilliance, and teachers don’t have the bandwidth for that.
Streamline Learning
From Our Blog
Case Study: Charlie
Charlie’s parents specifically sought me out because they knew I could be firm. They had heard that I do not put up with bullshit from lazy, unmotivated kids. So they hoped I would be good with their son Charlie. Charlie needed something. Between his documented...
Case Study: Beth
Beth was the youngest of three sisters. Previously, I had successfully tutored the first two girls in the family in test preparation, but Beth was starting out with a lower score on the SAT than her siblings. She was a good deal more shy than her older sisters. There...
Case Study: Adam
Adam was a second child but a faster learner than his older brother, who was naturally a hard worker. Not that Adam wasn’t serious and diligent; he was economical and therefore appeared lazy in comparison. As a junior in high school, he understood that some...