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In a socialistic system – our current public educational structure - there is no competition; therefore there is no incentive for improvement or innovation. ******************* I don't see that there is no competition in the current system. We may be headed toward a situation where there is no competition, however. In some places, there is little competition because all the schools are at the bottom. Many factors make schools competitive. Some school districts can pay more $$$$ to recruit and keep the best teachers. (There are some fine teachers in public schools.) Some school districts are located in areas where the population has a higher education and income level, AND the parents there are more prone to pour extra money into the schools. I could go on and on, but I have to GO. I'll check back later. I must say that I am unsatisfied with many aspects of public education. We have pulled two of our children from public schools, and we are homeschooling them now. We have a few others attending public schools, and they do not appear to be suffering.

I find that if I criticize the public schools to people who work there, they get very upset. They know they are doing the best they can given the circumstances...

But if I just shut up and let them talk, they start telling me stuff that makes my hair stand up. However bad I think it is, its really worse. But they cannot imagine an alternative.

You can't have a free society without an educated populace, an uneducated population requires government by an elite. So the stakes are enormous. But the current system is so bad that the risks of changing it are far less than the risk of not changing it.

Privatizing education will not help if a federal bureau dictates the curriculum, and obligates them to the same social work that the public schools are currently doing. Step one, public education must be returned to local control. Step two, we need to institute school vouchers. Private schoola are not the holy grail, but will offer a variety of competing approaches, and it is this variety that we need to encourage if we are going to find something that works. But if government supervises private education too closely, we will have gained little.

Most people are worried that we will lose our country to open borders, as people come pouring in who have no idea what this country is about, and what it takes to make it work. I have a different fear. I fear the barbarians who leave the public school system, not knowing what this country is about, and what it takes to make it work.

When we turn our kids over to people who mock our values, we commit a kind of suicide. Our gene pool lives on, but the spirit is stunted or choked off.

Educating our people to be technically competent and to have a grasp of the (small "r") republican virtues is the battlefield where we are currently losing our country. We either get control of our schools or we will lose it all.

I will certainly start watching for her articles!

One concern that I have about schools is the amount of homeschooling. I understand the need and the frustration of parents wanting to see that their children get a good education, but is this playing into the hands of the liberals? Conservatives are basically giving up on public schools. This is very troubling. WHY DON'T WE TAKE BACK OUR SCHOOLS?

"when the government is no longer a factor in education – then we will see a difference"

Bullseye. Thank you, Catherine. Keep up the good work.

“If you expect a nation
to be ignorant and free,
you expect what never was
and can never be.”
Thomas Jefferson

Unfortunately, vouchers are a means of medicating the symptoms - not the disease.

I think a quick comparison of the education system today back to a time when it was considered more successful (pre-social counter-culture revolution Amelia describes), between failing systems and successful ones in the US today (urban, suburban and rural) and between our system and other systems worldwide would lead you to the conclusion that vouchers are not a cure, only a method of pain management.

Discipline, cultural emphasis and parental involvement remain the ingredients for success - at home, private or public school. Divorce, welfare, open borders, two income self focused parents, etc. undercut the quality of schools.

School boards in small systems can be influenced for good or bad by a small core of parents, teachers and administrators. Larger systems are victims of bureaucracy and waste.

As I read through the posts to this thread and most others seeing the spelling and grammar errors, it is no wonder the public school system is having the problems it currently has. Just amazing that FReepers who claim to be educated well beyond high school cannot spell or compose simple sentences. It only takes a few minutes to proof read what they post; yet they do not take this time.

This post scored 75.3 on the Flesch Reading Ease score which rates text on a 100-point scale; the higher the score, the easier it is to understand the document. For most standard documents, aim for a score of approximately 60 to 70.