“The ONLY problem with public education is the failure of parents who sit on their rear ends doing nothing but complaining.”
I’m a doer. Not a sit-on-the-sidelines’er. We homeschool.
However, we have had to learn about our local high-schools because we have had foreign exchange students over the years who must go to a public school. And we are active host-parents. So we have seen both homeschooling and public school up close and involved.
Frankly, you are completely wrong in the language I quoted above. That is teacher’s union argle bargle. Our local highschool has: (1) At least 32 assistant principals (mine had 1 and was a bigger school); (2) A history teacher that tells the class the Spanish American war was an example of American paranoia about communism; and (3) An art teacher who can’t spell; and (4) An English teacher who cannot spot a triple-run-on-sentence. And that’s a small sample of the things we have learned over the years.
If you regarded the schools as a division of a company, they are producing far inferior product now than they did forty years ago at about four times the cost per pupil in real dollars. Plus, they have become a propaganda arm for every silly leftist cause you can imagine. If they were the division of a company, that would be the equivalent of the division actively promoting blowing up the company’s operations facility. In any sensible world, the division would be shut down and started over after decades of aggressive failure. That’s a radical solution to a radical problem.
It’s not just the schools.
It’s the fact teachers have to get thru education school before they can be teachers. And education school apparently consists of a lot of “how-to-teach” courses that make sure they can’t teach and little time teaching them about the subject matter of their classes.
Its the the fact that educrats control most of the boards locally and nationally that decide curriculum and text books.
It’s the fact that both my wife and I have considered running for school board. But the political reality is that anyone who does so and who is not a toady of the Teachers Union has a great big bucket of union money thrown at them in the election and will probably be defamed in the election campaign with it.
So if you pull out any leg of this structure, the other legs will just rebuild the stool. That’s why folk pose radical solutions. Radical solutions are necessary to make any change.
Parents have little say and that is deliberate. Financing used to be local. When things went south in the schools, the board faced the actual folks who were paying their taxes. Between the Serrano v. Priest type decisions, the Dept of Education etc, school money now comes mostly from States or the Feds. The guys that write the checks aren’t the parents anymore. The schools don’t care about the parents as a result.
The only general fault on the part of parents is that they don’t pull their kids out and drop the entire structure because noone shows up for school one year.
Well said. We have mixed home schooling w/ public school. We are also fortunate that our schools are not nearly as far gone as some. In instances where we needed to resist we have been successful, but it was not easy; it was a fight every time. We will graduate the second of four this spring. They are doing well.