Coming clean first, I'm a Special Education Teacher and have been teaching for 25 years. I have worked in many different settings, with students who have had many different abilities/disabilities. I have 4 children of my own, ranging from 24 years old on down to 9.
If your child struggled/es in any academic area, have you or would you consider tutoring? I'm wondering if parents today, find more value in individual tutors or prefer the color cutter places like Mathnasium, Sylvan Learning, Kumon, etc.
How much faith/trust do you have in the education your child/children is/are getting? Are they attending public schooling, private schooling or being home schooled?
For a little background, my wife was a reading interventionist for years both independently and in a school setting. She started working for a small tutoring company when she was in grad school (for special education also) and once she graduated started her own company where she tutored kids one on one. Once our kid was old enough to go to school, she went to work running an intervention department at a charter school here in Colorado to be able to keep the same hours as him.
To answer your first question, when we had our son, we discussed that if he ever needed help (even with reading) we'd absolutely get him a tutor that wasn't mom. We would both by far prefer a reputable referral for an individual tutor over one of the cookie cutter places you mentioned. The biggest reason being is you know exactly who your kid is going to work with and what quality they are whereas a place like Mathnasium might have several people who work there, and Jill might be awesome, but Jack might be dog water.
As far as how much faith I have in the education MY child is getting, I think it depends on the school and child.
My son started in a K-12 (split between K-5 and 6-12 campuses) classical charter school that my wife worked at and was pretty rigorous academically. Because of the pace of the classes, It was great for the kids that can access that level of instruction but not for kid's with any type of learning disability. My kid flourished and was well above a 5th grade level in all of the standardized tests they gave him. The K-5 school environment was totally different than the 6-12 environment (not in a good way) and because of that and wanting him to be able to focus more socially during his middle school years, we decided to move him to our local neighborhood middle school.
When he got to this school he was lightyears beyond the material they were teaching but the school did an excellent job recognizing that and modifying assignments to challenge him. I believe he would have gotten lost in the shuffle in most other schools and not progressed much but between both my wife knowing how to advocate for him and the school being a fairly new school (he came in year 2 of the school opening) so they had had the most recent "best practices" in place and weren't stuck in old ways.
Overall, after watching what my wife had to go through to get support for kids who needed, and were legally obligated to receive, that support, I don't have much faith in the public education system at all. There are too many kids who need help, especially after losing the covid years, and not enough money to go around.
