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I agree that it is impossible to condemn all of public education and I am sure that you and many other teachers are doing fine work. Even so, huge problems still exist.

What I see here in the Minnesota educational system (a longtime RAT stronghold) are far too many cases where the worst of the cliches are true. In addition to the myriad of horror stories a simple search here on FR would yield, every one of my friends with children in public schools could tell similar tales.

Minneapolis schools are periodically found to be well below national averages and then they undergo well publicized and terribly expensive reforms and are then touted by school officials as being among the nation's best. Later on, of course, we are treated to a different accounting in terms of further failures and more calls for greater funding. I have seen this propaganda cycle several times and catagorically believe the politics cannot removed from education. Unfortunately, the politics here are pretty much all rooted in Leftist ideology.

Personally, I won't send my kids to an institution that delivers less (or worse - a PC curriculum) than what they need and we don't have the time to fight school administrators when things sour and then tutor on top of it all. We chose to homeschool. As an aside, we actually do tutor a public school student twice a week for extra income.

I fully support public education, but not as the teachers unions insist. As you said, parents are a big, big part of the equation but reforms are desperately needed as well.

I'm in the middle of a huge fight with our school district here in California.

They are closing schools because of decreasing enrollment. However, they are not using academic performance in their criteria for closing schools.

My kids school is on the chopping block, and it is a National Blue Ribbon school. There are other schools that are failing in the district, but "it wouldn't be fair to use academic performance as a criteria for closing schools."

Anyway, a group of parents is fighting this. We're trying to secede from our district and create a smaller district. In one week, we have gathered over 1000 signatures on a petition to seceded. We need 8000, and I think we'll get them.

We've gotten lots of publicity. I've been on the news.

We accidentally ran into Tom Campbell (former congressman, and currently in charge of the budget for the state of California) at the grocery store, and he wrote a letter to our superintendent.

We (parents) are trying to take back our school district.