Posted on 04/01/2012 8:42:49 AM PDT by wintertime
Regarding: So-called "good" government schools
This “good schools” idea should be closely and critically examined. Why? Because the afterschooling, private tutoring, and preschooling, done by good parents, and the hard work of the child, is never considered when government school districts, ( or real estate agents), proudly proclaim that their schools are "good" schools.
How do we know that these schools are “good” or not, if the contributions of the parent's afterschooling, private tutoring, or the massive amount of work done by the parents in the preschool years, is **never** studied and formally measured?
Perhaps these so-called “good” schools are merely ordinarily bad, but it is the parents in the preschool years, and the child diligently doing homework and projects, and their hard work **IN THE HOME**, ( AKA "afterschooling"), that is the real reason these students have high standardized test scores.
Afterschooling has **never** been studied by education professionals. In more than a decade of posting on forums on the Internet, no teacher or education professor has ever provided me with a link to a study that evaluates the contributions of afterschooling, private tutoring, the efforts by parents with their preschoolers, and the hard work done by students with homework. A Stanford professor of education e-mailed me and told me that none of this has **ever** been specifically studied or carefully measured and evaluated!
Why is this important?
We in the U.S. are literally crushed by government school taxes. Really, we are! In some of our states, the amount spent on government schooling is nearly a quarter of million dollars per child for 13 years of schooling. Essentially, no one ever truly owns their home or business. We are renters. The government is our landlord and property taxes are our rent. And....Please remember that business property taxes (passed on to the customer) raises the price of everything that we buy and use, makes our products less competitive abroad, and encourages businesses to move jobs off-shore.
Look at the serious economic and sad social consequences of single-payer and socialist-entitlement schooling, ..yet... **no one** really knows if our schools are teaching anything. It could be that they are merely sending home a curriculum for the parents and child to follow in the home, serving as testing centers, and providing grading on projects.
Anecdotally, I see the hard work of my own children with my grandchildren. I talk with good parents in my church. They work with their preschoolers every day with Internet programs that teach phonics and beginning arithmetic. In the early years they are supervising homework at the kitchen table. They check regularly to see that their children are not falling behind in reading skills and with basic arithmetic and algebra. They insist on regular study times and habits. They get private tutoring help when needed. (They are essentially doing everything that good homeschooling parents are doing! ) Who will take the credit for the high standardized test scores of these children? Yes, the government school, of course!
Also, ( anecdotal observation), after working with the cub scouts and youth of our church, I have concluded that the **only** children who are learning to read and do basic arithmetic are those children whose parents are, and have done, **tons** of afterschooling and preschooling in the preschool years. ( We live in one of the "reddest" counties in the U.S. and our population is vanilla ice cream white!)
Finally,... ( another anecdotal observation).... I have found that there is little to no difference between academically successful homeschoolers and successful institutionalized children in the amount of formal study done **IN THE HOME**. Both sets of academically successful children ( home or institutionally schooled) have parents with similar home habits and values, and the amount of time spent at the kitchen table or child's desk IN THE HOME is about the same. So?...Isn't it worth taking a good look at whether or not the success of an institutionalized child is due to the so-called "good" government school or due to the efforts of the parents and child **in the home**?
Good point. The correlation between income and test scores may not be more public school money per kid but more enrichment and tutoring provided by parents outside of public schools.
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If carefully examined, studies would show the following:
1) Parents **are** the education. They aren’t just “enrichment”. They **are** the education. Parent of academically successful children are essentially homeschooling after school.
2) Government schools are merely very very very expensive testing services.
If carefully examined studies would show that parents are NOT remedying the defects of classroom teaching. Studies would show that parents **ARE** the teaching, and the Prussian-style institutional schools are merely testing services.
And yet homeschooling is an option, as well as private and parochial schools.
The facts really never bear out your emotional responses do they
I resent all the wasted life that I ever spent in my Prussian-model elementary and High Schools. I will never get that time back.
Actually, parents can not make up for wasted school days in the evenings. Chrildren come home tired and numb after a day at a school specializing in chaos and stupid.
The schools get a child’s alert, ready to learn, hours. Mom and dad get a worn out kid.
It was a big political ploy run by unions to shift responsibility for the poor shape of public schools from themselves onto parents.
Parents should be the "primary" educators of their children. By the time they get to school they should know manners and how to follow directions. They should also know not to make bigoted/ racist comments.
If all parents did this then really education could be done in the schools instead of teaching them all these things that should have been taught at home.
Also this thing you keep erroneously referring to after schooling is wait for it........ called homework.
WOW what a concept actually expecting that things that are taught at school are reinforced so that they have complete understanding.
By the way, there are no private schools in my county. The government school monopoly and price-fixed cartel drove them out of business decades ago. How many businesses can compete with a government that gives a service away for free?
All the pathology seen in our socialist-entitlement and single-payer schools will be seen in Obamacare, and the same arguments used to defend government schooling will be used to defend socialist medicine.
Very very good point.
It is amazing that parents of government institutionalized children do as well as they do, given that their kids are exhausted. We should all remember that parents **are** the education. They are supplementing anything.
Who is the author named slef?
I am so happy that I was not tasked with after schooling my daughter as she learned Mandarin, Arabic, and German in high school. I am sure my husband is happy to have been left out of that mix as well. I am happy we weren’t tasked with her middle school Latin studies as well. I am sure we could have followed along with the Latin, but I suspect daughter would have taught us. Lol
I do not disagree that public schools are an inefficient mess. I am thankful for the opportunities that our children have had in public and charter schools. I am also tha Kabul that we could homeschool when we believed it to be beneficial. But we do not have a welding shop or a metals shop or an auto shop. Our high school has these facilities and more.
Not so. Smart kids don’t need their parents to help them master the curriculum. They generally don’t need to do homework in order to master it either.
Sure, discipline is better than the lack thereof, and smart and educated parents are more likely to provide a good example, have high expectations, and teach their kids good habits.
But the academic cream of the crop rises no matter what the circumstances—they just happen to be concentrated in higher-income communities. There are glaring exceptions in selected immigrant communities, and they used to be much more randomly distributed. But as Charles Murray has documented, the social mobility in the US has led them to be concentrated in the upper-middle-class enclaves that are generally known for their “good schools”.
Homework is **NOT** reinforcement. It **is** the education.
Little of the instruction inside of the godless government classroom is of benefit except to exhaust the child and waste his life.
If a person knows an educated child that child has been homeschooled either through traditional homeschooling or afterschooling ( AKA “homeschooling after school”).
Seriously, you can get so much learning into a 2-hour session if you are homeschooling. We can do a few chapters of our math book in 1/2 hour (elementary and kinda fun math), then play recorder for a while, do some knitting, then read a book, write about it, and draw a picture or do some other art project. Then we have time for a nature walk, or playing with the baby. And remember that we have the rest of the day to follow his interests — if we hear about a twister, we can jump online and learn what they are all about.
Learning is part of life forever. It’s not all about what happens in a classroom of 30 peers. It is life.
And when we read and talk about books (we don’t read texts except our math, kinda, but real books by people enamored of their subject), I don’t have to tell him who was gay back then and what gay means. I don’t have to discuss saving the earth. We don’t have to stew over diversity. He’s the most diverse person ever anyway, being a glow-in-the-dark redhead, there are very few of his kind anyway! :)
slef?
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I missed that! :-)
It is much more productive to sit in front of your computer and whine!
Don't run for the school board! Don't petition and get others involved, just sit around and Kvetch, it is really much more productive than actually doing something.
And BTW you would think that someone as educated as you claim to be would know that the correct spelling of slef(sic) is actually "self."
And BTW none of us believe you that there is no alternative to public schooling.
Seriously, what if we did away with public schools, which cost taxpayers around $12,000 a child in many places?
What if states gave every 1 custodial parent $2k a year for their school aged children? Let the parents do what they want with it. Buy crack, or spend it on private school tuition - schools will sprout up like mushrooms in every neighborhood - or on curricula and educational trips for homeschoolers.
Bad parents will always be out there. Why should we pay tons of money to house and feed the kids for them? I don’t use the word educate because this kind of kid is not getting educated. Look at Trayvon’s twitter messages and try to claim we are educating everyone in public schools. I dare you.
This is based on how many years of teaching in the public system on your part, Oh that's right ZERO.
Little of the instruction inside of the godless government classroom is of benefit except to exhaust the child and waste his life.
And with out a shred of documentation this is just more of your opinion. And how may of your own children followed your advice to home school?
If a person knows an educated child that child has been homeschooled either through traditional homeschooling or afterschooling ( AKA “homeschooling after school”).
More opinion with out support.
I still have that list of students that you can take under your wing and shut me up once and for all by proving your theory.
h one thing the one that was homeshcooled for the first ten years and was 50 lbs over weight, well he is not on the list, He got himself arrested for punching the snot out of his mother. But his mother might be willing to give you custody of this delightful little imp.
I am certain that the outstanding teachers that you had also resented your presence, when they could have been working with children whose parents actually taught them respect.
Ok....Where are the studies that separate that which is learned from the **tons** of afterschooling, preschooling, and private tutoring, done by parents from that which is acquired in the Prussian-model classroom?
Where are the studies?
My conclusion:
These studies are not done because it is likely the results would show that it is parents who **are** the education. The government schools are merely sending home the curriculum ( homework) and serving as testing and grading services.
Seriously, what if we did away with public schools,....
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Answer: The same kids who are getting an education now would get an education then. Those not getting an education now would still not get an education.
Read the mission statement of your local govt school. If it’s not contradictory and incoherent, it’s probably so vague as to be meaningless.
How can the greatness of an organization be measured if it has no formal purpose?
So what’s it all about, then? The lessons are in schooling itself. Schooling teaches intellectual dependency and conformity. It inculcates passivity. It prevents the exercise of decision-making. Students learn to depend on the judgement of others to determine their self-with.
All of this is intended to create a docile working proletariat of 90% of the students. A small percentage is steered toward medicine and law.
The schooling of the ruling class, the 1-2%, is completely different. It’s classical.
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