Is Public Education Necessary?

The New American ^ | 2009-10-15 | Sam Blumenfield

[B-Cause]

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The Enemies Within Our Education system

Education Unions (the N.E.A.), School Administrators and Yes - Even Some Teachers

Worm in the Apple

What is to be Done?

Leave No Teachers Behind!

Lefty Teachers Meet the MP3 Player/REcorder

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[668 - Neighbor of the Beast]

No school can ruin an otherwise good education.

900 hrs a year...six to eight hours a day, five days a week, given up to one's mandatory attendance at school, certainly can make a good education virtually impossible. It would take a very unusual individual to teach himself what was missing in an educational regimen consuming a third of every weekday; and determine what was false, and find the truth.

A dear friend of mine, having attended public school from k-12 with almost no gifted track academics despite a genius IQ, said it was like spending those 13 formative years working full-time in the sewers. Except people get paid for that, and have a choice.

If no school can ruin a good education, then no slave labor camp can ruin a good job.

[paulycy]

If no school can ruin a good education, then no slave labor camp can ruin a good job.

I see what you're saying.

My comment rests mainly on my experience that most good parents instill a limited number of good principles in their kids which end up being learned quickly and well. When the teaching they hear contradicts these principles then the parents explain why or why not they should accept the new teaching.

But as you said, there is SO much time the kids spend in the govt schools - and the left wants them to spend even more - that the parent doesn't get as much of a chance anymore to instill those few but very good principles.

Kids need fewer hours of school studying fewer "social" programs. Govt needs to spend fewer hours passing new laws and trimming the deadwood out of the legal code, too, but it won't happen unless some profound changes are made to the people we put in office.

[CHATTAB]

How dare you use the word “ubiquity” with a public school educated person! (Seriously, I had to go and look it up.)

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

Ping.

[traviskicks]

nice article, you might appreciate this one:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1672282/posts?page=1

[Puddleglum]

Not necessary.

Funny how Republicans who are so strident against gov money and rules in health care have no trouble with letting the government monopolize education. And notice how the same dire predictions regarding health care have already come true about gov involvement in schools - poor performance, low standards, huge dollars in and crap results out, bureaucrats deciding what's best for you, etc.

[ALPAPilot]

I attended public schools and received a good education.

Public schools wouldn’t be so bad, but like everything else, they’re increasingly being controlled from Washington.

The second statement makes me doubt the first. You will have a difficult time showing that the location of the government control of a school is decisive.

It would be much easier to prove that the following:

We have a bad education system because:

a) Parents do not directly pay for the education of their children. (this is a consequence of basic economics)

b) Fathers have abandoned the family. (the data for this is overwhelming)

[ALPAPilot]

I often wonder what percentage of freepers send their children to public school. Has there ever been a poll?

None of the conservatives freepers send their children to public schools.

[Cboldt]

-- And notice how the same dire predictions regarding health care have already come true about gov involvement in schools ... --

We have seen this Government socialize our education system and make our schools among the worst in the world. We have seen this Government take over most of our health care system, making private insurance less and less affordable. We have seen this Government socialize our energy resources and bring our Nation to its knees by cutting the development of our own oil and natural gas supplies. And now we see this Congress yielding its constitutional obligations to a Federal bureaucracy, giving it the power to control virtually our entire financial system.

Senator DeMint on the Bailout - Oct 1, 2008

[SoftballMominVA]

what you are noticing in Virginia is not the lack of unions - there certainly is a union presence, but the lack of a REQUIREMENT to join a union.

VA is a ‘right to work’ state. In a RTW state, unions carry very little weight. However, in an “At Will” state, all employees in a very wide variety of industries are REQUIRED to join the union - as in, being a member of the union is a condition of hire. Dues are forcibly taken from paychecks.

In fact, over 60% of the NEA funding comes from at will states - One has to wonder if one of the ways to defang all of the unions is to push for more RTW so that they become unnecessary.

[JenB]

If there had suddenly been a big change in national test scores, downward, I would believe that NCLB had had an effect like you say. But the schools were not all just peachy until Bush came along. They’ve been useless sewers of ignorance for a long time. NCLB may not have helped but it can’t be the only thing to blame.

[SoftballMominVA]

Are you a teacher? Because I am - and what you are describing is so far from the truth in any school I have even heard of. The closest that I've seen come to what you are describing are schools that have failed and have been given to an educational corporation to be run.

And, btw, teachers best be teaching to the test - what else are they going to do? If I know my students will be tested, among other things, on figurative language, why would I not teach similes and metaphors just because they are on the test? That doesn't even make sense.

Besides, teachers cannot teach to the final test as we are only given the guidelines of what to cover - not the test itself.

One more thing before I sign off for the night.When your doctor, your airline pilot, your H/VAC repairman, your mechanic took their various board certifications -- dont you hope they were taught to the test? I would hate to think the airline pilot in whose plane I am in was taught about brain surgery rather than how to fly. I want my H/VAC guy taught how to repair my system, not how to knit doilies just because his teacher had a passion in that area.

[murphE]

Dismantle Public Education -excellent short video

[PhillyMom]

Here’s a little story for you. I live in a suburb of the city in Philadelphia, very nice, working middle and upper middle class neighborhood. The City just spent millions renovating our neighborhood public high school that NOBODY living here sends their children to and it has been like that since the sixties. The residents always availed themselves of the parochial and Catholic high schools. That output of money seemed like a total waste to me and the students that attend do not live here.

Anyway, the last testing report published in the papers listed the students at a 95% poverty level; that was shocking; and this particular high school that no one living here sends their children to was just designated for the first time as a dangerous school by the Fed Dept of Education - I called the local community paper and asked if they were going to at least do a story on it - I’m still waiting...they won’t touch it.

So, the effort to change a student’s environment, by transporting them to out of their neighborhood, the ultimate classic progressive BS, does not necessarily change their behavior, and renovating a school does not necessarily mean that the residents will use it...so it was a total waste of time and money, which is the typical progressive result. I do know, though, that if I have to homeschool, my grandchildren will never set foot in a government run school.

[secretagent]

The sad thing is they are probably correct that getting rid of big gubmint is a lost cause.

The cause of liberty can never die, because humans will keep discovering it.

[wintertime]

excellent video.

[JenB]

Thanks for your two cents. The idea that teaching to the test is bad has always seemed weird to me, nice to hear that some who teach in the public schools think the same thing.

It’s like in college when students would ask “is this going to be on the exam?”. If they really understood the course material as a whole and not as discrete parts, that question would be irrelevant in most subjects.

[highlander_UW]

Obviously everyone would agree that children should be educated. However, the federal government should have ZERO role in that. If public education were to remain than it should remain at the state level, but better than that a voucher system would allow parents to select the best quality education provider that lines up with their views of the best way to educate their children. Of course democrats would hate this plan because it removes children from their indoctrination camps...errr schools.

[Swing_Thought]

If there had suddenly been a big change in national test scores, downward, I would believe that NCLB had had an effect like you say. But the schools were not all just peachy until Bush came along. They’ve been useless sewers of ignorance for a long time. NCLB may not have helped but it can’t be the only thing to blame.

I'm not saying NCLB is the reason many public schools are failing, but I am saying that NCLB is making many public schools, especially challenged inner city public schools, much, much worse.