Waiting lists are good. To crack a nut pressure is needed on two sides. On one side there are the desperate parents and children, and those who sympathize with their plight. The pressure on the other side are state budgets and the K=12 socialist school system is more than 50% of expenditures. The legislators are already being squeezed between these to pressures and the K=12 socialist schools will eventually crumble. Hopefully it will be in time to save our nation, our freedom, and our great experiment in self government.
Charles Murray is right. We need qualifying exams. While Murray proposes these exams for post high school education and training, why not start them in first grade? If a child proves that he has mastered a topic, ( for example, addition math facts), he would be immediately moved to the next level in that subject. Certifiable qualifying exams would encourage parents and children to take the initiative in self-learning, promote private tutoring businesses, and encourage private Internet based schooling. The Internet program and testing could even be free if the developer accepted advertising.
Also, any child of any age who passes the GED should be immediately awarded an official high school diploma from his local K-12 socialist-funded high school. The more quickly a child moves through the system and exits the system, then fewer teachers and buildings will be needed.
Finally, **all** state K-12 and university socialist-funded courses should videoed and placed on-line. Taxpayers paid for it. Why hide it from them? Coupled with certifiable qualifying exams, it could speed the education progress through the K-12 years and make attendance on campus less necessary.
Re: Vouchers
Pell Grants and loans on the college level are a form of vouchers. These programs have encouraged the growth of "Big Education" which is really a form of fascism. There has been huge inflation in tuition as government money has poured into these grants and loans. So?...Why do we think things would be different with vouchers? If vouchers lead to complete privatization of K-12 education and complete separation of school and state, then I support them. If they are not a means to that end, then I do not.
There are lots of good ideas on our side about how to fix K-12 education, yours included, but until the several states abolish the monopoly they have given to colleges of education to produce certified (or credentialed or licensed or whatever the legislature decided to call it) teachers, it won’ t help. From my experience, about 15% of ed majors are dedicated, diligent students, who really want to educate children. The other 85% are ditzes who picked the easiest major in the university, are math phobic, and while marginally literate can’t write at what used to be an 11th grade level. The miseducation they get from colleges of education, rubbish from Dewey that’s been dragging down American education for over a century, Vygotsky’s erroneous ideas about the nature of knowledge, whole language reading, whatever the lastest useless enthusiasm in mathematics education is, “self-esteem” as a virtue, . . . Even the “real” stuff taught in colleges of education is at best education lite: a 3 credit course on using audio-visual equipment?? How dumb do you have to be to not be able to use an overhead projector or read the instructions to thread a film projector, or figure out how to give a power-point presentation?
Until the normative credential to teach a subject is an actual degree in the subject, nothing can be fixed.
And there are more in the pipeline.