The author. Dug around unsuccessfully to see if she has any children of her own...
Posted on 08/29/2013 10:08:42 AM PDT by Responsibility2nd
(Newser) – Do you send your kids to private school? Then congratulations: "You are a bad person," Allison Benedikt argues in Slate. "Not bad like murder bad—but bad like ruining-one-of-our-nation’s-most-essential-institutions-in-order-to-get-what’s-best-for-your-kid bad. So pretty bad." Her reasoning is simple: if everyone were invested in public schools—and not just monetarily invested, "but real flesh-and-blood-offspring" invested—they would get better. Involved parents can make a huge difference. Yes, your kid may not get as excellent an education. "Take a deep breath and live with that."
"If you can afford private school," even just barely, "chances are that your spawn will be perfectly fine at a crappy public school." They have support at home, and a family with resources—"the exact kind of family that can help your crappy public school become less crappy." You want a fostering creative environment, small class sizes, individual student attention? So do the poor people down the street. "Send your kids to school with their kids," and then fight to make that school better. Click for Benedikt's full column.
Don’t forget that one of Obama’s first acts as POTUS was ending DC’s voucher program. Somebody needs to interview those families and tell their story.
As a matter of fact, Romney, if he knew what he was doing, would have done just that and beaten Obama with his own policies. Fakers all.
The author. Dug around unsuccessfully to see if she has any children of her own...
If no schooling is the choice of the family, no one else has a right to force a different approach on them.
If the parents and family will support them the rest of their lives and they are disqualified from all welfare and food stamps for life I will agree with this.
BUT... That is not how it is and if I’m one of the tax payers who will have to foot the bill for their uneducated butts then HELL NO. They must have the same standards of education as everyone else.
So you can show me a significant number of homeschooled people that end up on the dole?
Especially when compared to their public schooled counterparts?
Don’t bother. You can’t.
There are responsibilities for homeschoolers as well but that part of it is not popular for you to talk about. When the failures happen and the children are not taught to grade level they are forced back into the public schools and instantaneously become the schools failure. At the same time they simply disappear off of the book of the home school organizations. It does wonders for the statistics of these home school organizations when they can simply erase all of their failures and give them to someone else.
I am totally for accountability of teachers and administrators in public schools. In fact In cali so is the state. If a schools test numbers are failing and do not show improvement within a very few years the administration is replaced. If that does not correct the situation then the state can take over the school and will start evaluating and replacing teachers.>p<
Since the vast majority of the winners of national science, math, and spelling awards are products of the public school system it becomes impossible to honestly and truthfully support your attitude towards public schools. Almost all of the students in college, almost all of the staff of those colleges, and almost all of the graduates of those colleges are the products of public schools. Your statement lumps all public schools into a pile labeled, "unmitigated failure" is proven by these undeniable facts to be irrational, unsupportable, and untrue. These statements may sound good but the facts and truth are on the other side of the argument. All schools are not good but all home school situation will not adequately educate the children either.
I always wonder if home school parents take their sick children to doctors who have no formal medical education, have medical skills that have never been tested or evaluated by professional medical personnel, and who can just call themselves a doctor and start practicing medicine because they think they have the knowledge and ability to do so. About the same mentality in my mind. Or would you go to a church and listen to a preacher who had never studied the bible?
Every teacher in this state a must pass three different state tests to prove knowledge in a dozen different subjects, they are tested by independent state testers. After 5-7 years of formal college classroom education they spend many months of supervised student teaching under the direct supervision of two different qualified teachers in two different classrooms. After that they usually substitute teach for several years before they are hired and get a classroom of their own. We are now about 10 years into the path of being a classroom teacher. Homeshcool parents appoint themselves teachers because, "they just think they can." Quite a contrast isn't it. There, I got back to you. The truth and provable facts are not going to change.
“There are responsibilities for homeschoolers as well but that part of it is not popular for you to talk about.”
There ARE such responsibilities, but homeschoolers are not accountable to government for them. Only a secular liberal would think otherwise. Real conservatives understand that there are limits to state power and authority (or, at least, there are in non-totalitarian societies). And when one considers how incompetent government is generally at providing K-12 education, the point that government has no business evaluating homeschoolers is underlined.
“When the failures happen and the children are not taught to grade level they are forced back into the public schools and instantaneously become the schools failure.”
Having been involved with homeschooling for well over a decade, I can tell you that homeschooling failures are few and far between, unless one counts the cases of manipulation by public school authorities.
However, I’ve seen large numbers of folks leave their failed public schools after watching their children educationally abused by public school teachers, and then enable their children to thrive as homeschoolers. The ratio of public school failures ==> homeschool successes vs. homeschool failures ==> public school successes is probably about 40:1.
“In fact In cali so is the state.”
Really? How many public school teachers in California were fired for their incompetence at teaching their students last year? What percentage of teachers in California is that? What is the high school drop-out rate in California? Why aren’t the two percentages roughly the same?
“Since the vast majority of the winners of national science, math, and spelling awards are products of the public school system it becomes impossible to honestly and truthfully support your attitude towards public schools.”
Since public school students comprise approximately 85% of K-12 students in the United States, I would be interested to see your documentation that at least more than 85% of such award winners are public school students. Anything less than 85% is evidence of the failure and underperformance of public schools.
Of course, such an assertion begs the question of whether that metric is the most meaningful to evaluate public school success. I'd view graduation rates as demonstrably more important, as awards go to a very tiny percentage of the population, but obtaining a meaningful high school education is vital to every student. I'd look at median test scores over large numbers of homeschoolers in comparison to national averages. The last study I saw showed that homeschoolers average about the 86th percentile on several standardized tests of academic achievement. Obviously, public school children didn't do as well.
But go ahead and document that over 85% of the aforementioned award winners are public schooled. It'd be a start.
I'll note that admits to Ivy League schools are 55% public schooled. Thus by one measure of excellence, public schools fail rather miserably.
As well, you confuse success while attending public school with success caused by a given public school. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc. Public schooling no more causes good educational outcomes generally than the rooster’s crowing causes the sun to rise in the morning. You will find that the same thing that causes success in spite of public schools is the same thing that causes success in homeschooling and many traditional private schools: parents. Decent parents generally provide nearly universal excellent homeschooling educations to their children, often provide good traditional private school educations to their children, and many even overcome the impediments inherent to public schools to provide good educations to their children.
I'm sure that wintertime has introduced you to the concept of "afterschooling."
“I always wonder if home school parents take their sick children to doctors...”
This is the root of the blindness of public schoolers, thinking that education of children requires specialized knowledge that is unavailable except to the priests and priestesses of education schools. Actually, folks graduating with degrees in education are, on average, among the least intelligent folks who graduate from college. Education majors regularly underperform students in nearly every other field on measures such as the GRE.
In fact, especially for elementary education, pretty much anyone of normal intelligence and knowledge can homeschool his or her children successfully, given appropriate conditions.
sitetest
If you read my posts you will see that I almost never comment on the academic success or failure of government schooling.
These are a few of my objections ( none of which are based on academic success or failure):
—It is utterly impossible to have a religiously, culturally, and politically neutral education. Such a philosophical state can not exist in the mind of any sentient human. It is true also for the classroom.
Therefore...Government schooling is a First Amendment and freedom of conscience abomination for those who are under police threat to use the schools or to fund them.
—Government schooling is currently godless in their religious worldview. Godless is **NOT** religiously neutral in content or consequences for the child or for the larger culture. Children who attend these godless schools ( many under the threat of police action) **WILL** learn to think and reason godlessly. They must just to cooperate in the godless classroom, read their godless texts, a do their godless home assignments. How could it possibly be otherwise.
Therefore....It is a freedom of conscience and human rights abuse to force any child into a godless environment or to force taxpayers to pay for the ESTABLISHMENT of godlessness in the larger culture.
-—Government K-12 schooling is a single-payer, compulsory-use, socialist-entitlement. The children who attend risk learning that any voting mob powerful enough to give a child tuition-free schooling is powerful enough to give them LOTS of “free” stuff and use the threat of police force to make them use it.
My grandparents ( born in the 1860s and70s), my grandmother ( born 1894), and my father ( born 1913) all attended the nation’s first state owned and controlled K-12 socialist-entitlement schools. It was these generations that gave the nation Woodrow, Wilson, the Federal Reserve , the 16th and 17th amendments, prohibition, the failed League of Nations, violent unions, the cyrpto-Marxist Franklin D. Roosevelt with his New Deal, and LBJ with his Great Society. It has only grown worse since then.
—There are NO studies that prove that prison-like and Prussian model government schooling even works! It is UNKNOWN where and how the child acquires his knowledge. It is my anecdotal observation that academically successful institutionalized children and homeschoolers are spending the SAME AMOUNT OF TIME studying IN THE HOME!!!
Maybe, just maybe, taxpayers fork over a universe of money to fund a system that is completely USELESS in imparting knowledge to the child. Maybe, just maybe, the only thing government schools do is send home a very expensive curriculum for parents, the child, and paid or unpaid tutors to follow IN THE HOME!!
— Most government owned and run schools resemble prisons. In fact, from a distance of more than a block or two it is hard to tell the difference between a government school and a prison. Cliques, with their fashion trends, share many of the characteristics of prison protection gangs! The child is confined to a government assigned space. He is march around with people of the government choosing to the sound of bells. The government tells him when he will urinate and defecate. The government tells him when he will eat, rest, and exercise. The government orders state approved exercise and his play areas resemble prison exercise yards. Government school buses look like prison transport.
— There are government schools in this nation that are soooooooo horrifically dangerous and drug infested that it would be better for the child to NEVER GO TO SCHOOL!! Illiteracy and innumeracy can be fixed. Dead or permanently disabled can’t be.
-—Children waiting for their government transport to school look like day laborers lined up outside Home Depot.
—Government schooling violates The First Amendment Right of the child, his parents, and the taxpayer. Freedom of speech is strictly controlled by the state, Most the time the child is ordered to shut up. The rest of the time he my only speak in a politically correct ( Orwellian controlled) manner. He can not publish freely. His freedom to assemble is destroyed, first by being forced into a prison-like environment. and then by being forced to assemble with people of the governments choosing. And...The godless and religiously NON-neutral worldview of secular humanism surrounds him like water for a fish.
It is NOT natural to segregate children away from their parents and the larger society. More than 150,000 years of human experience screams against such a inhumane practice. Our human ancestors would be APPALLED that we treat children these way.
Therefore....Given all the reasons listed above GOVERNMENT K-12 SCHOOLING IS CHILD ABUSE!!
(not proof read)
Here is my suggestion:
—Eliminate government schooling. We need complete separation of school and state.
In the meantime.....
I think **all** government K-12 teachers should be require to take Calculus 1, sitting the **same** classes ( elbow to elbow) with the science, math, and engineering students. Do all government teachers need Calculus to teach their subject. No! They don’t, but it would help assure two things 1) that hey they were smart enough to deserve a government paycheck and 2) It would help keep math phobics out of the schools.
In the meantime.....
All government teachers should be required to take the GED every 3 years. Most would fail the math portion.
I found a lot of very general statements based on your opinions and not a single provable fact. I went to public schools and learned to debate on factual information based on provable truth.
The god part of this reply is over the edge. You seem to believe that if your god in your way is not in the schools they have no chance of success. In that you are trying to impose your god your way on each and every Parent of students, teacher, and administrator there. What in out constitution gives you this right?
You must be reading a different constitution than I am. Get back to me when you can argue and debate with provable facts.
One big hint. We teach and deal with a lot of Chinese exchange students. They are way ahead of our kids as far as education goes. They go to school or are in organized study for 13 hours a day five and six days a week. They are very advanced by our standards but God will not be found in their schools at all..... There went that idea.....
WRONG!!!!!
At least in this state home schoolers are supervised by a government certified and credentialed teacher and if they are not at grade level they are forced to go to the public schools.
Funny thing about that... Our son attended a private Catholic high school and gradated this year. The math teacher at that school who was not credentialed could not explain the
Calculus 1 AP work to him. My public school teacher wife taught him and a couple of his classmates Calculus at our kitchen table every night. The AP courses are college courses that the advanced kids can take in high school.
Wow a credentialed teacher and well educated mom taught her son college level math but is some how not intelligent enough to teach third grade. I think I hear another argument dissolving into a puddle of?????
This is like chasing a roach around the kitchen table. I give up.
I will not be responding any further to your posts.
Wintertime's Rant:
If you read my posts you will see that I almost never comment on the academic success or failure of government schooling.
These are a few of my objections ( none of which are based on academic success or failure):
—It is utterly impossible to have a religiously, culturally, and politically neutral education. Such a philosophical state can not exist in the mind of any sentient human. It is true also for the classroom.
Therefore...Government schooling is a First Amendment and freedom of conscience abomination for those who are under police threat to use the schools or to fund them.
—Government schooling is currently godless in their religious worldview. Godless is **NOT** religiously neutral in content or consequences for the child or for the larger culture. Children who attend these godless schools ( many under the threat of police action) **WILL** learn to think and reason godlessly. They must just to cooperate in the godless classroom, read their godless texts, a do their godless home assignments. How could it possibly be otherwise.
Therefore....It is a freedom of conscience and human rights abuse to force any child into a godless environment or to force taxpayers to pay for the ESTABLISHMENT of godlessness in the larger culture.
-—Government K-12 schooling is a single-payer, compulsory-use, socialist-entitlement. The children who attend risk learning that any voting mob powerful enough to give a child tuition-free schooling is powerful enough to give them LOTS of “free” stuff and use the threat of police force to make them use it.
My grandparents ( born in the 1860s and70s), my grandmother ( born 1894), and my father ( born 1913) all attended the nation’s first state owned and controlled K-12 socialist-entitlement schools. It was these generations that gave the nation Woodrow, Wilson, the Federal Reserve , the 16th and 17th amendments, prohibition, the failed League of Nations, violent unions, the cyrpto-Marxist Franklin D. Roosevelt with his New Deal, and LBJ with his Great Society. It has only grown worse since then.
—There are NO studies that prove that prison-like and Prussian model government schooling even works! It is UNKNOWN where and how the child acquires his knowledge. It is my anecdotal observation that academically successful institutionalized children and homeschoolers are spending the SAME AMOUNT OF TIME studying IN THE HOME!!!
Maybe, just maybe, taxpayers fork over a universe of money to fund a system that is completely USELESS in imparting knowledge to the child. Maybe, just maybe, the only thing government schools do is send home a very expensive curriculum for parents, the child, and paid or unpaid tutors to follow IN THE HOME!!
— Most government owned and run schools resemble prisons. In fact, from a distance of more than a block or two it is hard to tell the difference between a government school and a prison. Cliques, with their fashion trends, share many of the characteristics of prison protection gangs! The child is confined to a government assigned space. He is march around with people of the government choosing to the sound of bells. The government tells him when he will urinate and defecate. The government tells him when he will eat, rest, and exercise. The government orders state approved exercise and his play areas resemble prison exercise yards. Government school buses look like prison transport.
— There are government schools in this nation that are soooooooo horrifically dangerous and drug infested that it would be better for the child to NEVER GO TO SCHOOL!! Illiteracy and innumeracy can be fixed. Dead or permanently disabled can’t be.
-—Children waiting for their government transport to school look like day laborers lined up outside Home Depot.
—Government schooling violates The First Amendment Right of the child, his parents, and the taxpayer. Freedom of speech is strictly controlled by the state, Most the time the child is ordered to shut up. The rest of the time he my only speak in a politically correct ( Orwellian controlled) manner. He can not publish freely. His freedom to assemble is destroyed, first by being forced into a prison-like environment. and then by being forced to assemble with people of the governments choosing. And...The godless and religiously NON-neutral worldview of secular humanism surrounds him like water for a fish.
It is NOT natural to segregate children away from their parents and the larger society. More than 150,000 years of human experience screams against such a inhumane practice. Our human ancestors would be APPALLED that we treat children these way.
Therefore....Given all the reasons listed above GOVERNMENT K-12 SCHOOLING IS CHILD ABUSE!!
If gubmint school teachers were required to pass Cal 1, we would have a major teacher shortage. Alg 1 is all that is required in TX and it shows. I tutored Alg 1 at the state teachers college years ago for extra cash when my children were small. Most of those I attempted to tutor were paralyzed from the neck up. Many would take Alg 1 five times before earning the requisite “D.” I personally believe that if one is incapable of passing Alg 1 with an “A” in one semester, one needs to pursue a different career. Dummies have no place teaching our children. Obviously, the the State of TX disagrees with me.
I decided to homeschool my children upon seeing the average intelligence of teachers graduating at that time. It was truly shocking and eye-opening.
“WRONG!!!!!
“At least in this state home schoolers are supervised by a government certified and credentialed teacher and if they are not at grade level they are forced to go to the public schools.”
That may be the law, but it doesn’t mean the law is right. The state may have power, may have force, but it has no moral authority to coerce parents regarding the education of their children.
Children, and people generally, are not creatures of the state. The state exists at the sufferance of the people, to serve the people, to obey the people. It is the government that should fear the people, not vice versa.
But governments, once established, loath freedom.
The founders understood this and that is why they tried to build a government of limited scope and powers. Unfortunately, the totalitarians of every age fight against limited government, and in our own country, in our own time, have largely succeeded in breaking down the constitutional limits of our governments, at every level.
As well, what happens if public schoolchildren, taught by public school teachers in public schools, are not at grade level (which is the case with so many millions nationwide)?
It is idiotic to force the tiny number of unsuccessful homeschoolers into a system that fails at educating tens of millions.
Shame on you, totalitarian.
sitetest
Think of it more as chasing the totalitarian fox through the meadows with a pack of hounds and hunters. With the right attitude, it could be a lot of fun.
This one squirms a lot.
Oh, and notice, this totalitarian fox offered absolutely no evidence to defend its assertion that public school students win the "vast majority" of various academic awards. Here's a hint why it offered to evidence: the evidence doesn't exist.
In fact, far from it. Private school high schoolers, who account for about 8.5% of high schoolers, account for roughly half of National Merit Semi-Finalists each year. Homeschoolers kick in a percent or two. Meaning that public school high schoolers, with roughly 90% of the high school population, don't quite muster half the NMSFs in the United States. That means that private school high schoolers achieve this status at a rate of an order of magnitude higher than public schoolers.
This suggests that those who succeed in public schools do so in spite of the severe impediments and handicaps these schools generally place upon them.
Yet, this totalitarian fox thinks that the malfeasant public schools should regulate homeschoolers. LOL.
sitetest
Typical leftist response: If something doesn’t work, metastasize it.
Two examples;
1) If failing homeschoolers should be required to attend the government’s socialist-entitlement schools, then the opposite should apply. Failing socialist-entitlement K-12 students should be forced to homeschool. Only fair! Don’t you think? :-)
2) If complete illiteracy and innumeracy is the the standard for passing to the next grade in the government’s socialist-entitlement school, then illiteracy and innumeracy should be considered completely acceptable for homeschoolers.
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