The problem with public schools is that too many parents have abandoned them. We get only three or four now showing up for parent teacher nights in each grade for the entire school now--no exageration. If parents want better schools, then parents should support better school systems and demand better teachers...parents could do so by getting state legislatures to back merit pay systems for teachers, so they would attract more qualified classroom leaders.
Do you favor merit pay, md?
"No, If you want to teach your kids at home, then fine that's your right...but you do have an obligation to support your coummunity's school system."
Why? Why is there an "obligation" to support it? The school system exists for the education of the children. It's only a means to an end. If there are better means to the same end, let's use them instead.
"The problem with public schools is that too many parents have abandoned them."
The problem with public schools is that they force parents to abandon them as the only way to safeguard their own children.
The discussion for our 3 year old is what private school to send hime to... public school is out of the question.
"If parents want better schools, then parents should support better school systems"
... that is why I support charter schools, vouchers and school choice generally. We cannot have better school systems without choice. Choice, involvement, diversity, and child-centric education. And for the taxpayers - efficiency via competition. That is what it should be about!
Give
Public schooling is not for everyone either and I would suggest that it is, by its nature, a dumping ground of last resort. My kids are going to get one education. Why should I put them in public schools???? Why should I put them in the hands of merely parochial schools?
I have one life to live and absolutely NO INTEREST in squabbling endlessly with public school teachers or bureaucrats. My kids will learn what I and my wife want them to learn---no more, no less. Planned Barrenhood will have absolutely NOTHING to do with their education whether publicly or sneakily. My children learn, will learn and have learned to be furiously Catholic.
Traditional Catholic homeschooling parents here in our part of Illinois (NW) have formed our own school according to our own tastes. Latin begins in grammar school using the same texts as my old Jesuit prep school used in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s. They also learn literature, algebra, geometry, science (not atheist propaganda), grammar and literacy generally, theology, history (using Samuel Eliot Morison for American History in Junior High which most colleges would not dare to use), world history, geography and a whole lot more.
My wife teaches there and has no trouble having conferences with parents. Out of state parents are finding local parents to house their kids during the school year so that they can attend the school. Even they come here for conferences when asked. The tuition is about 1/6 of the public edjamakshun per pupil spending in Westchester County, cited somewhere above. No tax money whatsoever goes into this school. There is no cherry-picking in admissions and we have had special education kids. We test only for academic achievement to determine which classes the new student is ready to start.
Why should my kids be deprived of a first rate education in order for us to try to save a public school system which we despise for many, many good and sufficient reasons? I don't think that public educators even begin to imagine just how very much genuinely religiously responsible parents and other taxpayers hate what passes for "education" in public schools.
I am sorry that many other parents do not see the virtues of abandoning John Dewey's/Horace Mann's dream and our national nightmare. I am responsible before God for the upbringing of my children. My accounting had better not be: Well, I did not know any better or Everyone else was sending their kids to public schools. I won't send my kids to the increasingly pathetic parochial school system in this, one of the most conservative dioceses in the US. Somewhat feminist Sister Mary Pantsuit serves as diocesan superintendent and is no better than the gummint schoolcrats and the results show it. She even wants certification of teachers.
Is there some reason for parents to attend parent-teacher soirees at your school? Will it make any difference whatsoever in the institutional mediocrity that is public schooling?
Even if SCOTUS were not the stubborn secular humanist engine that it is (fully competitive with public schools), I would not expect public schools to teach your children what I believe. By their very nature public schools teach the lowest common denominator and it gets lower each year. And finally, as ever, you suggest still MORE money be thrown away at these failed schools in the form of merit pay. How about an end to tenure and the ability to recognize a lack of merit by reducing bad teachers to minimum wage to go along with merit pay? Why is it a one-way street? My wife has a real education in English Literature at Yale and I guarantee that no faculty member at your school would be caught dead taking her paycheck or perks. A BIG part of her compensation is the sheer pleasure of teaching the kids. Her school is nothing but merit.
The problem with public schools is that they exist at all.
On what basis do I have such an obligation????
Only because the gummint puts a gun to my head and threatens ownership of real estate do you get one red stolen cent as a public skewel teacher. Not one cent now or ever is yours from me voluntarily.