[Clintonfatigued]

The article is a couple of years old, but very revealing.

[wizardoz]

Well, I've only been teaching for 2 years but I have to disagree. I am never bored with teaching or with what I'm teaching. Only frustrated that my students don't see the value in learning to write well. They just don't think it's a valuable skill.

[Virginia Ridgerunner]

Oh Captain! My Captain...!

[Antonello]

I get the feeling the author isn't so much against the 'public' part of 'public education', as much as he is against the current methods of the 'education' part. Perhaps a return to the good ole days of apprenticeships for 12 year olds at the local sawmill are in order. Who needs all that high falutin', boring science and engineering anyway?

I could be wrong, though.

[umgud]

I won't argue that there are problems in the schools that can be directly tied to the unions, the teachers and the administration, but I have tell you that a lot of the problem is a large contingent of students who aren't going to learn no matter what you do. This group of students is large enough to seriously bias educational statistics.

[Domestic Church]

Read his book!
The Underground History of American Education


http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/index.htm

[Tired of Taxes]

HOMESCHOOL PING

(An older article, but still worth the read).

[after dark]

I doubt anyone would miss the Prussian method of schooling if it were allowed to die from disuse.

[after dark]

"Genius is as common as dirt."

I totally agree with this statement...

[Tribune7]

Makes sense to me. Matches what I remember of high school

[Mr. Jeeves]

The successful society identifies the one student in twenty who can truly excel and puts the majority of its educational resources into those students.

Our society puts the majority of its resources into the lowest achievers ("Johnny is already smart - Billy needs the help and attention") in a grand game of "Let's pretend".

It's no wonder we have a rapidly growing H1B program.

[theBuckwheat]

My daughter was homeschooled, except for about two years during high school.

The high school refused to grant her credit for some homeschooling classes, not because the quality of her work was lacking, but because they did not have anyone on staff who was qualified to evaluate her work. You see, she was interested in languages, so we hired some native speakers from the student population of a local university to tutor her.

To make a long story short, the bureaucracy and rules almost killed my daughter's education. We had a family pow-wow and since she had already been accepted as a student at that university, we decided she did not really need to graduate from high school. So, we withdrew our daughter from public school and she finished her studies at home.

In a week, she graduates with a Masters with honors. She has earned two undergrad degrees with honors. She is now legally qualified to teach at the school that would not permit her to graduate. She still does not have a high school diploma.

The business model of the public school system is broken.

The incentive structure is upside down and inside out. Homeschoolers call public school: factory schooling. The teacher has an official lesson plan. Keep up or fall behind. Get ahead and get into trouble. Excursions from the plan are forbidden. Lock-step learning.

To add insult to injury, the public school system hides its true costs from the public better than Enron hid it from their shareholders. When asked about costs, the System responds with per-pupil expenditure figures. But these do not include capital costs.

In this local area, we are spending about $8,000 per pupil. Aside from the fact that if three pupils got together with that money, they could hire their own part-time grad student as a private tutor, that $8 grand does not include the capital cost of the over-built building. We are easily spending almost $10,000 per student per year in total, or over $120,000 to graduate a youth from high school.

But wait! It gets worse. If only half the graduates are proficient in, for example, reading at their grade level, it costs us almost a quarter of a million dollars to graduate one youth from high school who is proficient in reading.

The only beneficiaries of this con game are the educrats, who really aren't making all that much. This monster must be dismantled and replaced with vouchers. Let people get the schooling they want, from the school they want to attend. We will save a ton of money and get far better results.