What are your thoughts on public school? The government takes money from hardworking taxpayers and GIVES it to young immature citizens for 12 years!
You mean the public schools that consistently rank near the bottom in OECD rankings, those schools? Where about 19% of high school graduates are illiterate? The ones designed to prepare our children to be factory workers in a country with few factory jobs? Where children are generally forced into districts based on where they happen to live and have little choice to switch to a better school? Yes, those are the schools my taxes have paid for for decades now. Since I have little hope of recovering what I've paid into these, now that my kids are approaching school age I'll take some vouchers for private schools or homeschooling please!
This is interesting because I have a school-aged child. And being involved in the school over the last few years makes me wonder how to fix things. I'm an engineer, so I like experimentation and data. But I think data-driven answers at school often fail, because it's simply test scores.
In my area, the difference between a failing school and a succeeding school is nothing more than how white the students are. Our public schools aren't trying to train people to work in factories. They are pushing college, to families who wouldn't have the first idea how to pay for it or what to major in. What a joke.
So what the answer other than white flight? I don't really know. The fact of the matter is, my son is getting a fine education in a failing school. For lack of a better empirical measure, the white kids at our school score as well as the students at the rich school a half mile down the road.
And how to fix the illiteracy? Advancing students has been happening forever. My 70 year old step dad graduated from HS and couldn't read. My son has kids in his 4th grade class who can't do 1st grade math. Who decides to advance the kids?
From what I can see, our schools and our teachers are doing their very best with what they have - increasing enrollments, increasing # of kids who: don't speak English, are poor, have parents in jail, are homeless. I can't imagine how easy it is to teach to my 10 year old who can read and do math at the 8th grade level, along with kids barely at 1st grade level, who don't speak English. Or are borderline disabled.