I have no interest in disproving anything you said about Rockefeller or Carnegie.

Demographics have changed over the years. There are more students to educate. Your home schooling ides might work in an agrarian society, but we are increasingly and urban society. Can you prove that literacy rates might not be higher without without compulsory education.

To do what Gatto and his ilk suggests, would produce a coast-to-coast, border-to-border ghetto.

It's strange, but almost universally there is some conspiracy theory behind more radical libertarian movements. It's not just that things are bad, but someone is intentionally making them so.

I would be more interested in hearing from residents of Canada, Europe and Japan about how they are doing things than more libertarian paranoia.

BTW: I spent 34 years as a public school teacher. Twenty-five of those years were spent working with mentally retarded and multi-handicapped students. Had these kids not been in the public schools they most likely would have vegetated in the home. Special education students age-out at age 21. If they do not find a private employer willing to work with them or placement in some type of sheltered employment, they usually stay home and do nothing.

Homeschooling ideas-they do not actually belong to me-are particularly effective for an urban society. I have no idea where you came up with the agrarian slant. I have never lived on a farm in my life. My oldest son, who completed 12 years of schooling in 8 years and enrolled in a local university at the age of 13 is a computer programmer. He makes more money at 20 than I ever have doing the behind the scenes work for big corporations. So in your opinion, are my children all just geniuses since they all finish school a couple years or more before average? I do not flatter myself into believe that my children are all geniuses or that my teaching methods are so superior. Rather I believe it is the- teach to the standardized test- mentality of public schools that has caused them to fail. Anybody could homeschool and have similar results. The poor results of government schooling are the real surprise.

My best wishes on getting some international replies to your liking. I have my doubts.

You are hijacking this thread from its original purpose with extreme libertarian activist make believe.

You are a former teacher, who is probably capable of home schooling your kids. Fine! I would like to see a parent who can't balance a check book teach a kid algebra, trigonometry, geometry or calculus.

There was a couple in my neighborhood who had a son, who was both mentally retarded and suffered from cerebral palsy. The couple divorced and the woman got custody of the child - very appropriate since DNA testing showed that the husband was not the father of the child.

The woman pulled the kid out of school saying "he wasn't learning anything." While this may be true, the class he was in was, at least, attempting to toilet train the kid. She jerked him out of school and submitted a home school program. Being on social security disability, the lady had a case worker who just came to the door, but not in. She got a new social worker, who found the kid sitting on the floor in a puddle of his own urine with feces filled diapers and cockroaches crawling all over the place. - hardly appropriate for a kid in his late teens. This parent, and I suspect many others simply do not have time - are two wage earner households - or the skills to homeschool kids. I think the mom in my illustration was just too dasmned lazy to get up and put the kid on the bus in the morning.

After the new social worker came on the scene, I went out one day an the constables were removing the kid from these horrid conditions. Bravo!

Whether or not I get any responses from our non-U. S. members, compulsory education is world wide.


http://www.memory-key.com/Parents/international.htm

You are right it is hard to “demand” much from parents but you can “get their attention” by expelling Jonny when he is a bad boy and disrupts his class or threatens his teacher or fails to do his work or…………………..

You get the picture. Parents in many systems have come to believe that their child can do just about anything and still has the “right” to an education – I disagree.

Teachers as well need to meet the standards of the profession, and when they don’t they need to be removed from classrooms and retrained. Parents have a right to be unhappy when their children do poorly on standard tests.

Trust and respect are a two way street.

I'm not sure expelling or suspending kids gets a parent's attention. It may be that "Johnny" or "Jenny" treats his/her own parents as shabbily as he/she does teachers. Why not cart disruptive student off to an alternative school where there is trained staff to get them under control.


You are right, Ted. It's hard to come away from one of your posts without a crystal clear picture of something or other.


In many, but not all districts? Where does this attitude not exist to some extent. Still, it's irrelevant. Alternative schools are a better than turning troubled students loose on the streets to terrorize everyone else. It's better to try and reach them before they turn eighteen and end up in the clutches of someone like Joe Arpaio, whom you find has a "solution" to all things.


Would you please make a list of the standards of the teaching profession?


I agree that incompetent teachers should be weeded out of the system. In Texas every public school teacher is on a probationary contract for three years. It's hard to imagine administrators not knowing within that time frame who can teach, who can control a classroom and who can't.



How much weight would you assign to "do[ing] poorly on standardized tests to teachers? How much has to do with the test mentality that makes those tests "the gods" of education. From your previous posts, I would guess, you are not one of our younger members. Welcome to the club. Did the schools spend so much time testing when you were in school? You turned out alright. Uh, didn't you?


This is a simplistic, but never-the-less, true statement.

OK as long as the money doesn’t come out of the regular school budget or cost more per student.




Glad I am being clear BoF – would not want you to mis understand my positions!



Well we could check with your union – OH thats right they seem to have misplaced them – or something.

Typically it starts with a teaching degree – but since many awarded in the 70-80 are not worth much…………You tell me




The tests mean a lot to me – since they cover the basics that a parent should expect his child to have mastered at any point in the process. And yes I am old enough to have had the standardized tests like the Iowa series. The tests for children and teachers are needed and certainly it is not “too much” testing.

The grim reality is we have some of the worst schools and poorest educational results in the world and that has to change. The sooner the better.

This is a typical, conservative, [Re]publican (Thanks P. E. After hearing Tom Ridge's arrogant arse referring to us as the Democrat Party on Hardball yesterday, I'm joining.) response. Don't try to fix a problem, if it costs anything to do it.

It's going to cost you any way you go Ted. If problem kids aren't in an alternative placement, they won't be sitting at home praying like a bunch of monks. They will be out on the streets getting into mischief. If
the schools aren't given the money and tools to deal with it by the time they are 18 or 19, then we'll pay some thug with a badge, like Joe Arpaio, to do it later on down the road. Then it'll probably be too late


It’s utter useless to have been a professional educator for 34 years Ted, because everyone, including you seems to be an expert on the subject.

I agree with Barack Obama on the issue:


http://www.barackobama.com/issues/education/

I had come to this conclusion long before I retired in 2002. I’m glad Obama sees it now. It's the bottom of the 9th on testing, Ted. You seem to think were still in the first inning.

I tend to agree but io also feel that there needs to be some judgement used before the money is spent on a student. If the person is “redeemable” and shown progress in the program then they stay in – if not they are booted since no program can handle all the sociopaths that inhabit some of out schools.

And yes “typical Republican” reaction – lets not just throw money and people at a problem without some judgment that it is well spent. Yes I know Dems like Obama think that every city and town (where most schooling costs are) as well as the Fed have either infinite funds or can simply TAX us to death for every nifty idea but this is clearly not the case.

.

I never said I was an expert sir – just a parent who is not an idiot – who looks at the RESULTS and sees that we still have, after decades of promises and doubling of spending (more than once), one of the worst systems in the dam world. No need to be an expert to see that. Even a simple Republican can like me can figure that out.



Translate this into engliosh for me – since it is now in political code to appeal no dout to your Union.

How will genius Obama “improve the assessments used to track student progress to measure readiness for college”. Without testing? And remember when you answer that this is exactly what was supposed to be happening in the past – and hasn’t worked worth a dam.