While it is appropriate to write off many urban schools, I deeply dislike the idea of conservatives writing off all public schools. "Public school" is not a monolithic entity to be rejected by all decent people. The problem is that when conservatives refuse to participate as teachers, we abandon the majority of the next generation to a constant drumbeat of indoctrination from America's enemies. We need to be in there, fighting for the hearts and minds of the next generation.
Re: hearts an minds
The best way to do that is to first get your own kids out of the government schools and second, to lobby for vouchers, tax credits, and charters so that other children can escape, too.
Having had a ...very enriching.... experience thanks to the Los Angeles Unified School District (see post 12), I must disagree. There is a difference between abandoning children, which is something we should never do, and abandoning the government schools.
We shouldn’t just abandon government schools. We should bulldoze them and salt the ground they stand on.
The fix for educational ills is to end this welfare paradigm and privatize education in its entirety with provision made to homeschool or provide charity based education for kids who can’t afford tuition.
I am a public school teacher. Most of the teachers that I work with are conservatives as well. Granted, I teach in a free state (Texas), and in a rural community. We don’t use Common Core. Is it perfect? Of course not. Neither is it inherently bad just because it is “public school.”
Bullying remains a thorn in the side of such schooling arrangements. When vast crowds of students who are going there because of government mandate assemble, ill will and dysfunction is going to abound. The fortunate student learns how to steer clear of it.
There isn’t any perfect arrangement on earth. I wonder though why the modern internet hasn’t made schooling-at-home far more viable than it already is.
I’m teaching embedded computing in high school. I go right down to the logic gates and assembler language, and then bring them up into C then Internet communications over radio. This is in a public school. Blanket judgements are as useless with schools as with any other topic.
Just wait, as you gain wisdom with age, you will join the conservatives in writing off public schools.
You can convince me that public schools do a good job if you can get ANY graduate of a public school in our great United States to pass the eighth grade test given to students at local schools over a hundred years ago. It's on the net. Students then, went to one room schoolhouses for all grades, the older students helped teach the younger.
Now we a vast bureaucratic teachers union, that at huge cost to taxpayers, teach the little ones how to put a condom on a banana and the correct wearing of a hajib. And they can't spell, write coherently, or use logic. You defend public schools now, but you you will get over it.