In Brookline, at the corner of Beacon and Washington Street, shiny SUVs pull up to a nondescript yellow building. Kids hurry out of the cars, and teachers usher them through the building’s glass doors.

Hauling backpacks, binders, and notebooks, the students could be leaving the drop-off line at the beginning of an ordinary school day — except it’s 2:00 p.m. on a Saturday.

In the suburbs of Boston, education doesn’t stop when the bell rings. Many of the area’s more affluent, well-educated families, discontent with the public school system, seek supplemental learning for their children.

After-school math has become the extracurricular of choice. Parents send their kids to one of many programs: from national brands like Kumon and Mathnasium to local centers like the Studio of Engaging Math and the First School of Mathematics. But none seem as deeply entrenched in the greater Boston area as the Russian School of Mathematics, or RSM.

Started in 1997 by two Soviet emigres, RSM teaches over 80,000 students at 90 branches worldwide. Despite its global presence, its influence runs deepest in the greater Boston area, where it first took root.

Some parents say they send their children to RSM and similar programs to make up for a perceived decline in the quality of public education. Others simply want their kids to get ahead. In Cambridge, where two of the world’s best universities sit less than two miles apart from each other, academic pressure is a fact of life. Participation in Russian Math programs has become so widespread that it’s changing classroom dynamics within public schools.

Driven by some combination of public school policies and private, parental ambition, the balance of learning has shifted: in Cambridge, for some children, the center of math education has moved outside the classroom. In a school system still in recovery from pandemic learning loss, RSM and programs like it may push the students who can afford them further ahead, leaving others on the edge of a widening educational gap.

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A blue and green sign for RSM hangs above a doorway. The windows on the building list the courses and assessments that RSM prepares students for: “Math K-12,” “SAT,” “AP,” “Math Competitions.” The center’s logo is an undulating graph of a sine wave. RSM Brookline is a destination for families from surrounding areas — Cambridge doesn’t have its own RSM center, so some parents choose to bring their children one suburb over.

By Mae T. Weir

In interviews with several media outlets, ranging from Boston’s local radio stations to The Atlantic, co-founder Inessa Rifkin tells the story of starting RSM at her kitchen table. It was 1997, and Rifkin was unhappy with her son’s performance in math class. She placed the blame on the way math was taught in his school. “Slowly, I came to the realization that it’s not that he’s lazy,” she said to Boston Magazine in 2020. “He takes advantage of everything that’s offered to him. But not much is offered to him.”

Rifkin, who is from Belarus, began teaching her son math the way she was taught growing up in the Soviet Union. This led to her teaching after-school math at her kitchen table in Newton, drawing in other students from the surrounding community. Almost 30 years since teaching at the vaunted kitchen table, RSM has established centers around the world.

(Rifkin declined to be interviewed for this article.)

The classes at RSM Brookline number around a dozen, with students sitting in neat rows. The instructor lectures for a portion of the class, and then the students complete practice problems. Former RSM students from across the country describe the environment as focused and tense.

“I don’t think it was a very interactive classroom environment,” says Gabriella B. Hernandez ’28, an RSM alumna from Milton. “The professor would write stuff on the board, talk to you, and you would just copy it down.”

“It was a lot of working in silence,” says Sophie Gao ’28, a former RSM student from New York City and a Magazine Editor at The Crimson.

RSM’s pedagogy, however, appeals to many parents who were educated outside the U.S..

Andrey Fedorov, an Arlington parent whose child is enrolled in RSM, appreciates the assignments, feedback, and resources given to students. Fedorov and his wife were both educated in the former Soviet Union, where classes were “a lot more structured and well defined.”

Many students spend more time doing their RSM homework than their math homework from school.

Homework from RSM targets students’ abstract mathematical reasoning skills. Students are asked to complete some of the problems without computation, or to “look for shortcuts.” Problems given to elementary school students may ask them to fill in patterns or solve Magic Square puzzles. Algebra is introduced as early as the third grade.

Aislyn K. Cangialose, whose daughter previously enrolled in RSM, describes the homework her daughter received from RSM as “substantial” compared to that assigned in third grade. Once, her daughter wrote a letter for her English class begging her parents to remove her from the program. “She hated it so much,” says Cangialose.

Not all students have such distaste for RSM. Fedorov says his son “comes out of the class energetic, and so far, he likes it.”

From Brookline to Milton to Arlington, RSM centers span greater Boston. There are 15 RSM centers in Massachusetts alone, nestled in strip malls and office parks across the state. Each center teaches classes separated by ability, with students ranging from kindergarten to high school.

RSM isn’t completely unique, either. Similar “Russian math” programs operate throughout the area, as well as other centers offering supplemental math instruction. Week after week, Boston area students migrate from math class to afterschool math in droves, quickly surpassing their school curriculum.

To these students, though, it’s just math. RSM is just another activity in their busy weekly schedules. RSM homework is just extra homework. The program is a normal part of suburban Boston students’ lives, becoming core to their education.

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In an essay titled “Cities and Ambition,” Paul Graham, the founder of startup accelerator Y Combinator, says that Boston and Cambridge convey a message to their residents: “You should be smarter.” The Boston area, containing some of the world’s foremost universities, prizes education above all else. Future education plans seem to be on parents’ minds from very early on.

Monica Bueno, a Cambridge Public Schools parent, first heard about RSM when her daughter was born. “We had heard of Russian math from a doctor at the hospital, and when my daughter was born, he came in and he said, ‘when she’s older, do Russian math.’” She now has two children taking classes at RSM Brookline.

Bueno and many other parents we interviewed come from impressive professional and educational backgrounds. Cangialose received her nursing education at Yale. Fedorov is a researcher at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and is an associate professor at Harvard Medical School. Others graduated from top schools like Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania. Bueno founded a design consultancy firm, which she advertises on her LinkedIn. It’s no surprise that these parents — versed in the workings of Boston’s intellectual culture — are invested in improving their children’s education.

A large part of how Cambridge parents find the program is through the word of mouth of fellow parents. In this world of constant academic competition, when a parent hears another talk about their student’s success, the pressure builds to follow suit or risk having their child fall behind their peers.

Cangialose, whose daughter did RSM between third and fourth grade, says she felt like Covid-19 disrupted her daughter’s math education. Other parents suggested RSM as a possible solution. RSM’s business model flourishes in the education-minded circles of greater Boston.

Cangialose says she did not enroll her daughter in RSM for its “philosophy.” Rather, she felt pressure from other parents to make sure her daughter was keeping up with her peers who were pursuing extra math education.

“If her friends are going to be ahead in math, or on this different math path than her, I want her to be able to keep up and not be left behind — if that’s what everybody seems to be doing,” Cangialose says.

Parents say that Cambridge’s competitive parenting culture drives RSM enrollment in the area. Cambridge consistently ranks as one of the most educated cities in the country, and the specter of college admissions drives parents to push their kids ahead.

Media outlets call this culture an ‘arms race,’ with parents constantly raising the bar for academic success. “A parent is going to be worried if another kid is doing something outside of school and their kid isn’t, that their kid is going to be left behind in some way or not receiving some really important opportunity,” says Arjun K. Jaikumar, a candidate for Cambridge’s School Committee.

RSM markets itself in relation to the long game of college admissions. The Newton center lined its hallways with the SAT scores of RSM’s most successful students, whose names and marks were memorialized in a 2001 Boston Globe article: “Levon Margolin, SAT Math, 800/800. Ilya Abyzov, SAT 1580/1600”. Now, on its website, the program boasts that more than 250 thousand alumni have gone on to attend “the best universities in the world.” RSM also runs a blog, where they spotlight math competition winners and offer strategies for college admissions. “Worrying About College Admissions: How Early is Too Early?” reads the headline of one post. Another recommends that parents start teaching their children math between the ages of 0 and 6.

Parents may opt for extracurricular math because, unlike the humanities or social sciences, math at the grade-school level is a relatively objective field of study. It follows a set of unchanging formulas; there is a right answer to every problem. Meghna Chakrabarti, who enrolled her child in a different extracurricular math program, says parents also opt for math programs because those programs are most available. “In terms of other supplementary things like language or science or history, it’s harder to find tutoring services for those things,” she says. “They just don’t really exist.”

It also helps that success in math is easy to measure. RSM demonstrates its effectiveness through students’ SAT scores and American Mathematics Competition rankings. Those accolades, later down the line, can boost a student’s college application.

RSM does a great job of making students’ math education look good on paper, as their curriculum is much more accelerated than the math that students get in public schools or through other programs, according to Noah Heller, a lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

The focus on students’ math education is about more than just college admissions. Parents recall turning towards extracurricular math after Covid-19. Because of the pandemic, students lost nearly 40 percent of the progress they would have made annually over the last five years. With academic competition tightening each year, parents scrambled to help their children catch up.

Richard Harding Jr., a member of the Cambridge School Committee, says that parents turn to RSM because they feel like CPS’s math education is inadequate for their child. “You want to push the limits as far as you can to get your kids the best possible education you can get them,” Harding says. “People are attracted to some of these programs, like RSM, that they think can help their students have a better foundational readiness for high-level math and science.”

Jennifer T. Chen, who moved back to the U.S. after living in four countries across Asia, enrolled her son in RSM out of dissatisfaction with the U.S. education system. “When you are outside of the United States, you quickly become aware of the deficiencies in the American educational system, math being a big area where students often seem to fall short, especially — not to stereotype — compared to Asian countries,” Chen says.

Fedorov has similar critiques of the “very loose” American public education system.“He didn't have much homework, he didn't have any grades through fifth grade, and the material that he was learning in math was just too basic,” he says.

Some parents and public officials are dissatisfied with Cambridge Public Schools’ curricular offerings.

In 2017, the district made the controversial decision to stop offering Algebra 1 to eighth graders, as part of a broader effort to reduce gaps in math proficiency between race and income levels. Schools in the greater Boston area have experimented with “de-leveling”: removing accelerated classes, opting instead for students of different levels to be in the same class.

Districts such as Newton Public Schools and Brookline Public Schools have implemented such de-leveling proposals, drawing controversy. In 2024, Newton teachers petitioned to revert these policies, citing “no evidence” for “improved outcomes for any students.”

Elizabeth C.P. Hudson, a member of the Cambridge School Committee, says CPS is failing children with their education. “The programming that CPS provides during the day is wholly, completely, and categorically insufficient. That is the reason why we are talking about out-of-school-time programs,” Hudson says.

Hudson believes that de-leveling prompts affluent parents to go “outside the district” to seek education. This drives parents to enrichment programs, such as RSM, to allow their kids to get ahead when their school district will not allow for it. When this occurs, it can again widen the gaps that de-leveling aims to close. Students from families who can afford supplemental math will remain at a more advanced level, while others are left behind.

“​​RSM is responding to a market need,” says Chakrabarti. “I wasn’t looking for reasons to spend a lot of money, and a lot of time, on one of the basic subjects of elementary school.”

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But RSM may be a cause, not just a symptom, of disparities in themselves. Bueno says her children, who have been enrolled in RSM for five years, have become bored in their public school math classes. Instead of learning from the teachers, they have “become more like helpers in the classroom,” tutoring other students on their assignments after quickly completing their own.

“The gap is crazy,” says Bueno. “Like, when you think about what they’re learning at RSM, and what they’re learning in the classroom, it’s just insane.”

The school district faces a large learning gap already, says Hudson, who estimates that there are “five to seven grade levels of ability in the classroom.” With more kids supplementing their math education, that divide is only continuing to grow, leaving kids on both ends of the spectrum in an unfulfilling learning environment.

Teachers within CPS have cited similar concerns. Karen Engels, a fourth grade teacher at Graham and Parks School, has observed a disparity in math abilities among CPS students. “We are already teaching a really diverse population in terms of math readiness, and it creates a bimodal classroom where we have some kids who are far from the benchmark and some kids who are far ahead of the benchmark, and that is a challenge to navigate as a classroom teacher.”

She calls this phenomenon a “domino effect”: if a student is ahead of what their teacher focuses on in class, and their teacher gives them work from a higher grade level, then that student will be just as dissatisfied once they eventually age into that grade level. “The question is, ‘What is the advantage to being ahead?’” she asks.

The divide between students, Hudson says, forces teachers to make a hard decision: “You can either continue to teach and hopelessly leave half your class behind, or you can take a step back.” Many teachers, Hudson says, choose to go over the basics again.

Some CPS teachers believe that RSM and other extracurricular math programs are unnecessary for students. Engels questions whether RSM learning is functional for students. “When kids take Russian math, there are certain skills that they learn before the grade level sequence, but they’re not necessarily solid on those skills,” she says.

Having put three kids through CPS without enrolling them in any extracurricular math programs, Engels believes organizations like RSM are not necessary for students to thrive in the district. “With the resources that are provided in the district, nobody needs to feel like they need to rely on external sources for mathematical success,” she says. “If they want to be prepared for mathematics at very high levels, they can do that without any external resources.”

Not every school district in Greater Boston is as well-resourced as CPS — and the students in those districts are often unable to pay the tuition fees required to enroll at supplementary math centers. Ramil C. Dagondon, a math teacher at East Boston High School, says he has “never heard” of any of his students enrolling in Russian math.

RSM and programs like it are products of educational anxiety that only some families can afford to indulge in. Parents can expect to pay as much as $4,000 for a year of classes at RSM, with rates ranging anywhere from $28 to $40 per hour of class time.

The program’s centers are located in the ring of affluent suburbs that encircle Boston: Newton, Lexington, Belmont, Brookline, and Wellesley. These areas have top-ranked public schools, high household incomes, and parents with advanced degrees. “They’re very privileged that we can afford to pay for it. It’s not cheap,” Bueno says.

Dagondon would welcome supplementary math programs if the cost didn’t pose such a barrier to his students. “If those programs are available to our kids, then they’re beneficial,” he says. “But because they’re expensive, only the suburban parents could afford to have that, not the parents of our students.”

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Driving through the suburbs of Boston, we pass by several similar tutoring centers: the Studio of Engaging Math, Kumon, and Mathnasium. We sit in the European bakery that resides in the same yellow building as RSM Brookline.

The bakery’s patrons, both young and old, sport collegiate sweatshirts, working frantically on laptops. We overhear conversations about organic chemistry, philosophy, and the medical school application cycle.

Parents wait outside the RSM center, taking phone calls or walking their dogs. Students wave goodbye to their teachers and leave with their families. To them, Saturday is just another day of school.

—Staff writer Shawn A. Boehmer can be reached at shawn.boehmer@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @ShawnBoehmer.

—Magazine writer Antonino J. P. Libarnes can be reached at antonino.libarnes@thecrimson.com.