yup, me too... i got out in Jan and still graduated regents with credits to spare & never looked back either. till later that is... and now i guess it wasn't all that bad after all. 8^)
Posted on 09/04/2006 3:36:41 PM PDT by Diana in Wisconsin
This week's back-to-school ads offer amazing bargains on lightweight backpacks and nifty school supplies. All those businesses scramble to offer us good stuff at low prices. It's amazing what competition does for consumers. The power to say no to one business and yes to another is awesome.
Too bad we don't apply that idea to schools themselves.
Education bureaucrats and teachers unions are against it. They insist they must dictate where kids go to school, what they study, and when. When I went on TV to say that it's a myth that a government monopoly can educate kids effectively, hundreds of union teachers demonstrated outside my office demanding that I apologize.
The teachers union didn't like my "government monopoly" comment, but even the late Albert Shanker, once president of the American Federation of Teachers, admitted that our schools are virtual monopolies of the state - run pretty much like Cuban and North Korean schools. He said, "It's time to admit that the public education system operates like a planned economy, a bureaucratic system in which everybody's role is spelled out in advance and there are few incentives for innovation and productivity. It's no surprise that our school system doesn't improve. It more resembles the communist economy than our own market economy."
When a government monopoly limits competition, we can't know what ideas would bloom if competition were allowed. Surveys show that most American parents are satisfied with their kids' public schools, but that's only because they don't know what their kids might have had!
As Nobel Prize-winning economist F.A. Hayek wrote, "Competition is valuable only because, and so far as, its results are unpredictable and on the whole different from those which anyone has, or could have, deliberately aimed at."
What Hayek means is that no mortal being can imagine what improvements a competitive market would bring.
But I'll try anyway: I bet we'd see cheap and efficient Costco-like schools, virtual schools where you learn at home on your computer, sports schools, music schools, schools that go all year, schools with uniforms, schools that open early and keep kids later, and, who knows what?
Every economics textbook says monopolies are bad because they charge high prices for shoddy goods. But it's government that gives us monopolies. So why do we entrust something as important as our children's education to a government monopoly?
The monopoly fails so many kids that more than a million parents now make big sacrifices to home-school their kids. Two percent of school-aged kids are home-schooled now. If parents weren't taxed to pay for lousy government schools, more might teach their kids at home.
Some parents choose to home-school for religious reasons, but home-schooling has been increasing by 10 percent a year because so many parents are just fed up with the government's schools.
Home-schooled students blow past their public-school counterparts in terms of achievement. Brian Ray, who taught in both public and private schools before becoming president of the National Home Education Research Institute, says, "In study after study, children who learn at home consistently score 15-30 percentile points above the national averages," he says. Home-schooled kids also score almost 10 percent higher than the average American high school student on the ACT.
I don't know how these home-schooling parents do it. I couldn't do it. I'd get impatient and fight with my kids too much.
But it works for lots of kids and parents. So do private schools. It's time to give parents more options.
Instead of pouring more money into the failed government monopoly, let's free parents to control their own education money. Competition is a lot smarter than bureaucrats.
There is no school monopoly. There are half a dozen private elementary and high schools within a few miles of my house that I am free to utilize should I wish, and I personally know a number of families who choose to home school.
yup, me too... i got out in Jan and still graduated regents with credits to spare & never looked back either. till later that is... and now i guess it wasn't all that bad after all. 8^)
I know that that census was related to how much the schools received, but I don't know the formula. If I can remember to ask my AP tomorrow I will. I'll post to you what he says.
I don't have the resources to debate you on this, but I don't believe it on the face of it. For starters, there are too many unprovables in there, even if it the truth. That isn't to say that you don't make a great argument.
Nonetheless, while I am a supporter of homeschooling (and have done it), I am no longer comfortable with "retreat" theology. Take your children out if it is prudent. For the sake your ever loving civic duty, if you turn your back on the entire system and don't avail yourself of every avenue to influence, your children's nation is only going to be further down the road to destruction than it is already.
That must be a county/district thing - because I never received anything like that.
Bump for later reading.
You have a point. But I reckon the money will be spent, somewhere, somehow, someway. You know how it goes.
But I do remember that I had never gotten anything like that before or since (my kids were in 8th and 10th grade at the time) and I thought I had heard something about it being a census done every x years. I just don't remember the "x"
If it's a census type thing it could very well be a random thing, which would explain me knowing nothing about it.
One of the many catastrophes of the 1960's was the infusion of "federal aid to education" which of course meant the imposition of federal control. By 1970, as you point out, the schools were well along in their growing subservience to the federal "government" in return for money.
all turned out alright.
who pays the piper calls the tune...
There are no unprovables. This is all well known to scholars. Charles Leslie Glenn, Jr., Philip Hamburger, Lloyd Jorgenson, and others have all written on aspects of the things I mentioned. The most accessible single source is Blumenfeld's Are Public Schools Necessary? I highly recommend it, and you can proabably get ti on interlibrary loan. Hamburger, who teaches at the University of Chicago, only deals with the schools issue tangentially in his The Separation of Church and State(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), but gives a fascinating account of what that phrase has meant through history (until recently it was clearly understood to have an anti-Catholic connotation). Hamburger's book is long, but it is very well written. BTW, in case you are wondering, I am not Catholic.
As for "retreat theology", as you put it, rescuing your children involves no such thing. It is the only effective strategy for saving your child, helping your family, and restoring the culture. It would be far closer to the truth to describe those who give their children to the government schools as people who embrace "surrender theology." Surely you can't think that the government schools are reformable in any relevant sense. They work very well for the union and other constituencies that they actually serve. The public school system didn't really become totally dominant in education until about 100 years ago. fifty years before that the system didn't even exist except in a very few areas. What will destroy the nation is leaving the system in place.
The public schools were a reaction to Irish Catholic immigration in the 1830s,40s, and 50s. Initially, they were explicitly intended as means of coercively "Protestantizing" Catholic children. That is how the Unitarians sold the system to a country that was already the most literate on earth.I would appreciate a cite or reference on this, if you don't mind.The Unitarians' own motivation was to use the system to make Unitarianism the defacto established religion of the US. This would be accomplished largely through their control of the "teachers' seminaries" (later called normal schools, and today "schools of education"). If they could control the training of the teachers and the teachers' worldview, the Unitarians knew that local control over other things didn't matter all that much.
The Catholics resisted the encroachments of the "common school system" (what today's government schools were called then), which is why a Catholic school system developed.
...
>I watched Stossel's show the other night but I don't totally agree with him. I got the feeling that he was blaming the schools failure on the teachers and their union.<
Remember, these teachers were educated in universities with very left wing leanings and an agenda of their own. Also the agenda of the teacher's union, the NEA, is definitely a political PAC with the same agenda. Get "NEA, Trojan Horse in American Education", by Samuel L. Blumenfeld put out by Paradigm. It is a real eye opener.
It sounds like you're a parent who cares. You definitely don't deserve a beating!
How many kids do you have?
Thank you again.
We just have one - but she is a handful. As my husband says, we're slow learners and late starters.......our daughter is 8, he's 51 and I will be 46 later this month.
I agree teachers unions are evil. But how does home schooling take money away from the unions?
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Homeschooling removes the child from the classroom. With enough children removed, this means fewer classroom. Fewer classrooms need fewer teachers, and the unions get less money.
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