It is impossible to know how well a school is doing unless the hard work done by the parents, the child doing homework, private tutoring, and preschooing ( parent-led and private) are measured.
This has **NEVER** been done.
It is entirely possible that schools teach nothing and that it is the parents, child, and tutors who are doing the really hard work. It is possible that there are no “good” schools, merely very good parents.
Finally....It is my anecdotal observation that there is no difference between academically institutionalized children and successful homeschoolers in the amount of time spent at the kitchen table or child's desk doing “homework”. Both sets of families ( institutionalized and homeschooled) have similar home habits and value for education.
Conclusions; Schools teach very little. They are merely sending home a very expensive curriculum for the parents and child to follow IN THE HOME.
If only there was someone with an advanced degree and nothing but times on their hands to take on this valuable and worthwhile endeavor. Of course that would require less talk and more action.
BTW spelling Nazi I believe the word is pre-schooling
Essentially, the public schools are asking the parents, under the guise of *helping the kids with their homework*, to homeschool their children on the kids off school hours.
What parents are doing when they are *helping their kids with their homework* is homeschooling them.
Years ago when I was finishing up my college degree, some neighbor parents asked me to tutor their daughter in chemistry. I simply used the curriculum she had from school and did nothing different than what I ended up doing successfully homeschooling my own kids years later. A couple hours a week and her grades shot way up, much to the great chagrin to the rest of the kids in the class.
After a couple sessions with her and her grades on the next test, I had 4-5 kids sitting around the table with us, her friends who also wanted the help.
Public education is a failure if non-certified to teach parents are doing a better job of educating their children at home in a couple hours a day than certified, *trained* teachers are doing in HOURS a day, 5 days a week, 10 months per year.