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mojo84 wrote:This is obviously a very emotional subject. We all need to stop and realize there is not a one size fit all answer. We live in the United States of America. There are multiple options available and we are all free to choose which is best for our respective children. I can tell you, we choose to take the public school route with the understanding we would have to be heavily involved in our children's lives and education. It has worked out very well for us. We have several families in our neighborhood that choose to home school. Their kids are wonderful bright young kids that we love and think the world of.

I can tell you each one of the parents have told me and my wife several times how incredible my kids are. They are extremely impressed with how well rounded, intelligent, polite, spiritually sound and upstanding my kids are. My son is in the top ten of his class, second highest GPA on the football team, academic all-district, student council leader, honor society member, sheriff office explorer, non-stop drinker, free of drugs and has stated and led a lunch time Bible study. He's also been asked by the some of the home school parents to help their kids with some of their school work and socializing as some of them feel awkward and out of place when they are not surrounded with other home school kids. All this is in spite of being enrolled in public school.

Bottom line is, there are different options available and people should choose to avail themselves of the one that is best for them and their kids. It doesn't do any good to run down the choice others make regardless whether they choose public, private, charter, distant or home schooling. Kids excel and fail in all of them. Just because what is best for you doesn't mean that option is best for me and my kids. It comes down parental involvement, strong moral values and discipline.

I'm happy for your and your family that your particular public school situation is working for you. All parents and students should be so fortunate. We were not. My wife and I have education degrees, teaching certificates and taught in the public schools. As a teacher, my tendency was to take the teacher's point of view if our kids had problems. I'm not willing to share the specifics of several simply awful experiences that we had. I can tell you for many parents, involvement, strong moral values and discipline are not enough when it comes to many public schools. As a result of job changes, our kids attended school in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Texas. The problems are consistent even across State lines.

I honestly believe that the public has completely lost control of public education. For all of the talk about local school boards, too much of what happens in our schools today from the curriculum to school lunches to attendance policy is dictated by unassailable and often faceless, nameless entities. I could write pages about specific stories - the child in NC whose packed lunch was taken away from her by "someone" who determined that it wasn't nutritious enough yet when the school was challenged to identify the person making that ruling, they could not or would not. The girl in Philadelphia was expelled because she had an "L" shaped piece of paper that was supposed to look like a gun. Unchallenged bullying is rampant in some schools and some districts with only a fraction of the horrendous incidents making the news. My experience is that these are more than norm than isolated incidents. You can chalk most of it up to "zero tolerance" administrations who refuse to accept responsibility for anything.

There are many parallels between the public schools and gun control. The same tired play book of "blame the parents" is used to excuse the nationwide decay of educational achievement when there are at least 10 other factors involved. None of those other factors are addressed. The solution is always more money yet when an innovative educator reforms the DC school system without addition funding, she is sent packing. The teachers' union buttonholed the politicians to get her out.

As a tax payer, I demand transparency. Do whatever you wish but when you are using funds that you take from me in taxes, I expect to be allowed to see what is going on. That is why I'm so upset about CSCOPE. Even the State Board of Education does not have access to the details in that program. That is unacceptable.

Again, I’m glad for those who find good experiences in public schools. For the moment, our granddaughter is one of those elementary schools. Every child should have a similar experience. It is just not happening. Given the current governmental arrangements with the public schools, I cannot imagine how it ever will.

Edit: To correct typos and extra words.

mojo84 wrote: This thread did not start by suggesting people should have options. Go read the first post and title of the thread.

Sorry if that is a misrepresentation. I view distance learning as an option. Home schooling is specifically mentioned as an option. I viewed the discussion as centering around options besides public schools. What did I get wrong?

Keith B wrote: I am not knocking home schooling at all. What I am knocking is the home school parents who do not allow their kids to get involved in extracurricular activities. They exist. We had a neighbor who's kid was starved for outside activities and they were not allowed to participate. Those parents that do make the extra effort usually have well rounded kids. There are similar cases of private, parochial and public school kids who are socially introverted as well. It all boils down to how involved the parents want to be and the opportunities presented to them. I know those that home school in small rural areas do not have the same opportunities for outside sports, clubs, etc. locally that those who live in a metropolitan do. The place where those exist are usually in the public school.

Like any approach, there are those that the rest of us could judge to be incorrect. There are kids who are starved for social connection just as there are a few who succeed through the inner city school process. We had neighbors who home schooled their daughter through high school and when the girl went to college, she went wild. It was somewhat of a joke while I was teaching that the girls who were the most openly wanton in high school had been the products of a very tight and segregated by the sexes parochial school system.

I don't think that there is a perfect educational solution. This thread started by suggesting that parents should have options, which I whole-heartedly support. Charter schools, home schools and private schools should be in the mix. I'm adamantly opposed to the current direction of the public schools. While I recognize that there are pockets of good teaching that are occurring, the overall focus of the curriculum is wrong and, in more cases than not, I believe it is being poorly executed. Public schools are failing mostly because there is no accountability for either the material being taught or for the quality of teachers.

I have to admit that the commercial company from which I retired did a really lousy job of getting rid of bad performing employees but some of the same reasons as for the schools. Goals and objectives need to be clear and employee/teacher contribution toward meeting them needs to be assessed. Those goals and objectives in my business were no less murky than they are in the school environment.

What works is smaller, less bureaucratic organizations. Big banks fail, big auto companies fail and big school environments fail. Economy of scale benefits are greatly outweighed by bureaucratic ineptness. With smaller schools and choices, education in the US can stop falling behind the advances of the rest of the world.

http://rossieronline.usc.edu/u-s-educat ... fographic/

Simply throwing money at the problem is obviously not getting it solved. We've given over the schools to the social aspect and I believe that is wrong.

Keith B wrote: And the reason they don't turn into introverts is they have the opportunity to get out of that class and see their friends AT SCHOOL. If you take the same student and put them in a home environment where they parent doesn't get involved and get them out for social activities, then they WILL be come introverted. In your case the reason a lot of those students are probably there in the first place is because they spent too much time with their friends instead of studying.

For those parents who are interested in home schooling, there are lots of resources and support groups.

http://www.star-telegram.com/2013/01/31 ... rs-of.html

Several of the parents who home school in our area get together and take their kids on field trips to museums, etc. so that the kids are not taught in isolation. They also enroll their kids in sports, it Boy/Girl Scouts, etc. were social interaction can take place.

Our granddaughter goes to public school but some of her social activity is driven out of the private dance school that she attends.

A percentage of kids who are home schooled get to that point because the public school environment that they were being subjected to was not acceptable to their parents. Whether they were different and the object of bullying or that they had some difference about the way that they learned that wasn't working in the public school. Let me give you a specific example. Our granddaughter was upset last week when when of her friends, who is dyslexic, was subjected to a 4 hour reading test and given a 52% grade as a result. The girl was devastated and our granddaughter was in tears from seeing the result to her friend. Both children were obviously affected - and to what end? All the test did was exacerbate an already diagnosed problem. There was noone there except our granddaughter to comfort the distraught girl. What kind of an environment subjects a child to a test where it is a foregone conclusion that they will fail and then allows the results of that failure to become public? No amount of social interaction is worth this kind of a price. One size does NOT fit all.



L

Jeff Barriault wrote:I have a better idea. Adopt a plan like they have in Finland. Let the tax money for education go with each child. If a community wants to have a public school, it must compete with other schools for the children and the funds that go along with them. The schools in Finland hate it, but the competition has led to Finland having the best educated students on the planet.

Parents get to decide where their children go, and because they are given a choice, they tend to become more involved in the system. Unlike here where unless you have enough money to send your child to private school, you have a very limited choice of schools, if any.

I think that part of the detachment by some parents regarding schools is because they feel that they have not choice. Not everyone has the willingness to take on the establishment that many of us do. I can tell you from a series of personal experiences while our daughter was still in school that it isn't easy. I agree that some will be too busy or self-involved to pay much attention but I don't see that as a norm except in the inner cities. Competition always seems to lead to a better product.

I'm about to lobby our granddaughter' district about not accepting CSCOPE. So far they haven't accepted that program and I want it to stay that way. If the parents really understood what all was involved in that, many of them would be beating down the administration doors demanding that rejection. I'll bet that not 1 in 100 parents in the districts that have bought it even knows the name, let alone how bad it is. Full disclosure would make a lot of difference. You cannot expect parents to make good choices about their kids when you hide all of the facts.

SherwoodForest wrote:This is a serious question - When families visit the Gulf Coast do reasonable parents allow their young children to venture out into the surf beyond the "safe zone" generally considered to be too shallow for bull shark predation ?

Informed parents will not.

Yet the vast majority of parents continue to patronize a public school system that harbors drug dealers, child predators, rapists, armed robbers, murderers, kidnappers, random bullies, and is staffed by employees represented by educator associations publicly at odds with our constitutional principles.

The reason for the latter and not the former is the zeal with which the parents will be prosecuted if their children are not in school. No one will care if kids don't go into the surf.

The same people who bury their heads about problems with the National debt are usually the ones who ignore reports of problems in public schools. Lal Lal land runs from sea to shining sea and on a variety of subjects.

The Federal government entered public schools in a big way with Title I in 1965 with the stated purpose of helping to implement the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Like every other thing that they touch, the Feds salivated at the new found power and their influence has made the schools more and more unaccountable to the local citizens ever since. To fix the schools, the Feds will have to be extracted and I don't see that happening anytime soon. Even if that does happen, the big city teacher's unions will continue to ensure substandard education within their respective power zones. A kid that comes of most of those environments with a good education is a miracle.