When my grandchildren were in the first three years, I was told that teachers did not correct the spelling and grammar in their written work. The reason was that they wanted the students to get used to writing, and seeing so many corrections on their work would make them give up and not try to produce a better written product. I made all the corrections at home and we discussed them. The children did not cry or give up. They became better writers. So much education needs to be supplemented at home.
Horrifying, isn't it? Both of my boys' printing is atrocious. They were never taught how to properly form their letters. We are working on this now, but it takes a ton of time to undo bad habits and form new ones.
I hope grandmas everywhere will come together as a cadre of support. You have a place in this war -- take it.
The failure of schools to teach the most basic of skills was a primary factor in my choice not to have children. My wife and I couldn’t afford to have one of us stop working to provide the intensive basic education we wanted for our hypothetical kids. I was helped enormously by my mother staying home until I went to kindergarten- I already could read and write before I went to school. Of course, our house cost $19,000 in the late 70s, which is why my mother could do this.
You may not know this, but handwriting has huge benefits to learning (building neural pathways) that typing does not reproduce. Writing is muscle memory and another touchpoint (visual) and additional processing.
Well its definitely much more of a hand eye coordination activity and possibly more than that. But i would expect that between art/music class and learning write thoughts out into sentences (in any media), surely it would cover all the same bases?
Oh, ok, sure like for purposes of memorizing/learning something specifically. However, i only ever actually had to really write in English classes (very rarely, history and for that what youre saying surely applies) but for those english papers, it was all literary criticism and the goal was not at all gaining knowledge while doing the writing, you already had the knowledge before you started, the purpose of the writing was learning how to actually write a literary critisism essay.
Two decades ago I had a raging argument with my daughter’s English “teacher” because I read her homework assignments, noted improper spelling, grammar, punctuation and composition where necessary and insisted on corrections.
This “teacher” called me to demand I stop this practice because I was risking my daughter’s “love of learning.”
I told this woman that my kid wouldn’t leave high school unable to compose a proper email or essay and she was welcome to come to my home to try to force me to stop.
That daughter is now homeschooling her three children. Those kids are blowing their peers out of the water. Granddaughter age 11 is doing three digit by two digit multiplication in her head. Grandson 9 is particularly interested in physics. Both are reading at “high school” level. Three year old grandson insists on being included so he’s in a pre-reading phonics program.
In another 15 years everyone will readily discern who went to bureaucratic school and who didn’t, and those who didn’t will be running the show.
That was why I left. I saw all the opportunity cost of high school front and center with kids who should’ve been brilliant, but had been turned intro drones.
It’s very satisfying to see how my grandchildren are doing, particularly because I was an 8th grade dropout who finished university Phi Beta Kappa, magnum cum laude after being told by everyone I’d never get out of community college.
My grandchildren Will far exceed their more “acceptable” peers.
I volunteer as a tutor and for the last 3 years I've been working with the same student. Last summer I finally had enough trust from her family that I was able to pick her up on the weekends for the remedial math that I could tell from our sessions she hadn't picked up the first time around. I spent our first session giving her a basic assessment to see where she needed work - she started having trouble at subtraction of one-digit numbers, she didn't know her times tables above 5, and she didn't understand what a fraction was. Reader, she was 15. She's not stupid, she works hard, and she takes her education seriously, which was why she was willing to work with me every weekend in summertime.
In theory she is finishing up her geometry course this year. In practice I have *mostly* gotten her up to the standard her public "school" claims she is at, but if it weren't for me she would still think 1/4 > 1/3. I get the argument that parents are the ones responsible for their children at 7th and last, but surely after being forced to pay 20k/year/child for mandatory public education and being forced to send those kids there 40 hours/week for 40 weeks a year for 13 years, parents deserve to see *some* return on their investment. We shouldn't need private tutors to teach 15 year olds how to use numberlines.
Where I work, we teachers are working hard for our students. School is the center of a community. We lost a lot of that when we went into isolation. How do we all live together and get along and teach our future generations to do the same if we separate ourselves from each other because something’s not working? Do we solve problems by removing them from our lives or do we stay and fight for what we have and make it better? These things don’t happen overnight. Corporations sell the idea of virtual school and homeschooling as what’s going to save the children. I get that we have parents who are tired of nothing happening when their kids are being bullied or not learning. Therefore, the students leave public school and stay home. But you have to fight to change systems. Believe me, where I am, we are FIGHTING to produce better outcomes for our students. Our staff is on the same page: we will have a safe school where we have high expectations in work and play for everyone—-staff and students. We have students who lost so much learning during COVID, and we also have students who are allowed to be online for hours every day. These are just a few of our challenges. It’s a daily fight, but the rewards at this time of the school year are great. I know that parents are busy, and so many more demands have been placed on teachers. But being a teacher does not mean you’re a teacher to just the students. You are also a teacher to the parents, who many times are trying to figure the whole parent thing out.
If a parent has the ability to stay home, that’s great. But most don’t. Therefore, we must come up with solutions. One of them is to make sure that parents and teachers truly partner with each other, and to make all parties accountable. There are teachers, as in any job, who are just there for the paycheck. They make our job harder and they need to go. But the majority of teachers are here to teach and help students be positive community members.
Teachers are burnt out for sure. We need smaller classrooms and more teachers, less paperwork and more time teaching basics. We also need standards and curriculum that make sense for the age groups we teach!
As far as school boards, I’ve seen them make change when community members show up to the board meetings. This is the most political job out there besides actual government. We have to demand more, and when I say we, it’s everyone in the community.
Still, I've gotta tell you I've been down this road before.
The problem you're facing is that your plan to fix things relies on everyone doing what you think they ought to do, which you can't control. The system actively disincentivizes that for admin, teachers, and parents. Somewhere, a point of failure will emerge -- parents who will sue to stop you, or the majority just refuses to play ball, an administrator who's a political operative, teachers who talk a good game but don't do their part.
School boards are largely powerless in the face of regulation created by central DOEs from the state capital.
You're fighting an entrenched system that exists to grow and protect itself, and it does that best by making sure students don't do too well. When the kids fail, more money is allocated, more people are hired, more contracts are signed.
To the extent you can disintermediate what you guys do from what the central authority wants you to do, you'll have a shot. Good luck and godspeed.
I agree however parents must be involved. This child was clearly far behind for 6+ years. A parent must intercept these failures and find a way to correct it. Because the system won't.
Where else would it be acceptable to pay for a service (20k/yr/child), put in 40 hours a week, and still expect the parents to do this extra work evenings and weekends just to ensure that your child isn’t ridiculously behind? Yes, parents should notice when they are not getting what they paid for, but expecting parents to go above and beyond the mandatory cost and time of public school just to be at grade level (which is a dismally low standard) demonstrates a crippled system. This is unacceptable. Homeschooling is the answer.
Isn’t this half the problem though? Thinking of teaching as being a “service”? Of course in some sense it is (paying money in taxes so that a child can attend school), but it is completely different from other service industries to which you compare it. Teaching, done right, is far more than receiving a service for your spend; it is (or should be) a transformative, lifelong process of continual, critical involvement with reality and with our experience of this reality. That said, clearly public schools are not providing that either - and saying “it is the way it is” sounds remarkably defeatist; surely there is a middle way between schooling and home schooling?
True, but where do you go when you bring up to the teacher AND the principal that your child is not where he should be and they both deny it and/or downplay it???
I promise I'll be helping more with this very soon. I know lots of parents want to, at the very least, supplement their children's public school experience. Hopefully, what I put out will help them take that step.
Home schooling is not an option for most people. I looked into it very seriously. But I was a single mother and I had to work. Teaching is not easy, and it's a skill that has to be developed. Teaching your child is even harder. Mine had learning disabilities and emotional issues to boot. I was well educated and I knew my kid was not getting educated. But this is the way our society is set up. You work, your kids go to school, you barely survive. I solved a lot of problems along the way for my kid, but that was not one I could solve. It's just too easy to tell parents to do it themselves. If you can do that you're lucky. But not everyone is.
Education is not as complicated as it sounds. Your child needs to know how to read and be made to read. And they should drill math. Beyond that it's massively diminishing returns. Families need to find time to do those basic things. I'm not saying it is easy for all, but if you are relying 100% of the schools, your child is going to be poorly educated in 2025.
Your kid doesn't have time for you to fight the institution. It changes at a glacial pace.
You have to take the bull by the horns and do your best to supplement at home. The most important thing, IMO, is to figure out a way to get your kid reading widely and often.
You're going to have to take away personal screens to accomplish that though.
Maybe it's not complicated. That's debatable. It may be simple to determine what basic skills need to be taught. I agree that's the starting place, I'm not sure I agree that's where it ends. But any parent knows that it takes a lot for a kid to listen to their parent the same way they listen to a non-parent grownup. I'm not going to argue about parenting skills here and how parents should be able to command respect from their children. But let's assume for a moment that it is simple. That doesn't mean it's easy. Most importantly, it takes time. Time people don't have if they have to work full time. Which is almost everybody. The way our world is set up right now, this is the way it is. We need serious education reform. There's no going back to one room school houses and our society will not prosper if every individual family is deciding what their child will learn. The industries of today require higher math skills, analytical skills, social skills, and all of the things that public education in a country as rich as ours should be able to achieve, and it cannot be achieved in a homeschool setting. It's just not an answer.
You can't really change much. If the teacher is ethical, you might be able to bring some pressure to bear so your kid gets his work properly corrected so you can take charge of helping him with basic writing and comprehension skills. Outside that? School boards are basically powerless. The state's regulations are preeminent and damn near impossible to countermand.
Public teacher here. Agree in principle but to be fair a huge number of the students and parents (and administrators, forsooth) actively (if quasi-unknowingly) DON’T want the education anyway. Oh they THINK they do. They CLAIM they do but ultimately they do not actually want it at the cost required (thinking, learning, working, etc.).
And that part sucks too. And the fact is that our current public education system is not good at all at getting them to understand that learning is actually valuable.
They WANT a piece of paper. They don’t seem at all interested in getting the education itself. They don’t see it as ultimately valuable.
I wish we would spend more time on what I think of as meta education - we should have a deep and continuous discussion about why we are here doing what we are doing.
The only place I disagree with you is that I feel like it may always have been thus. But I go back and forth. Regardless it is definitely disheartening.
I vacillate too between "we can fix this with solid policy" and "there's no point because there are too many variables in this inherently human-based endeavor."
But a HUGE part of why parents don't value it anymore is that we have fully divorced grades from the reality of a student's knowledge and skill. Since we did that, everyone thinks they're entitled to the paper, not that the paper must be EARNED.
If we don't stop lying to the kids, parents, and ourselves (that this is all okay because trauma or systemic racism or poverty, etc.) then we will continue slouching toward Gomorrah.
Amen, amen, 1000 times amen! 15 year ago teacher me would flip out that I am about to say this but I wish we could get rid of grades entirely - only because they are now more of a distraction than they are worth.
I have the same vacillation. Though I am QUITE certain that were I to open a school and run it by the simple practice of hiring good teachers and letting them teach while backing them to the hilt then everything would go well.
And in case any might wonder what a “good” teacher is then I would say it is any teacher I watch teach and deem to be good. Because I am one and I know what it looks like.
I also couldn’t agree more about holding everyone to the same account but I do think it must be admitted that the way current schools are funded is of extreme and fundamental disadvantage to kids in poor areas and that disproportionately impacts people of color because they are disproportionately poor. But if we just start treating this as a poverty problem ONLY while making sure that EVERY child in poverty has the same opportunity as every child NOT in poverty then it will all eventually work itself out. The idea on the left today that somehow skin color qua skin color holds people back from doing well in school smacks of a type of paternalistic racism that I cannot stand.
I truly don’t know if the current system salvageable but if it is then it will need an overhaul on the level of a full frame off restoration, engine, transmission and suspension total rebuild, extensive bodywork and paint as well as a new interior. At a certain point one must ask if it wouldn’t be cheaper to buy a new one.
Regardless, thank you for your work and I’ll be following you once I finish this note.
I don’t know about CA but here in Detroit, the one thing that is not an issue is money……it’s abundant. Everyone gets a turn at the trough. And we have some of the lowest levels of literacy in America. There are many, many problems with public education, but the idea that money can solve any of these problems is a curious one. Here in SE Michigan, the difference in outcomes between Detroit kids and those from the Grosse Pointes has far, far more to do with parental involvement and what their home and daily life looks like than funding differences between school districts. The rich kids can survive public education, they can learn (to some degree) despite their public schools because they can afford tutors, traveling, cultural activities and are simply exposed to a wider variety of experiences. Most people don’t learn most of what they know in school, and what is essential to learn (reading, writing and ‘rithmetic) is easy, and cheap to teach.
Which begs the question:’why are we locking them into rooms where they’re not learning. Much for 13 years?
As for the poor kids, no, it’s not the money. It’s DEI policies that make excuses for poor, traumatized, poorly parented, etc. instead of telling them, “you can do everything the GPB kids do. We will help you. And we will hold you accountable for not interfering in the education of your peers, as well as your own education.”
Why send kids to school? I appreciate having a safe, caring place where my second-grader is surrounded by friends and gets three recesses a day. Admittedly, in some domains, he finds his public charter school here in Detroit too slow, so we supplement at home.
With an undergraduate degree in theoretical computer science (applied math) and graduate degrees in law and American legal history, I could homeschool in most subjects—but I’d rather rely on a trusted school for 80–90% of his education and supplement as needed rather than take it all on myself.
I admit I’m surprised to hear such dire descriptions of education outcomes. I have been generally pleased with my child’s education so far.
You’re at a charter, so you’ve selected a school that is better suited to your needs. It has to respond to them more effectively than typical public schools do because its funding is lower the. They typically urban public schools. Charters need consistent daily attendance and must remain attractive to families who have other choices. It’s not surprising that you’re happy with this option. Im glad you find the quality of schooling your child is receiving satisfactory.
I guess there is no one size fits all, but my approach with my (highly intelligent but lazy)8 year old third grader who grumbles about (Catholic) school is that she is free to quit as a soon as she can answer correctly, and consistently, any math question derived from the 4 basic charts we have on the walls, as well as read anything I give her and write a coherent paragraph or two about the content.
So far, her laziness is trumping her desire to be free of school, but it is early yet.
My own education was a bit of “Educated” with some “Glass Castle” and Liars Club” thrown in. My highly educated, and Jesuit trained father wisely counseled us children that even if we just managed to learn how to play cards in the street after we dropped out we’d be better off than having gone to public schools…and that was the 70s.
Get rid of compulsory education.
If the government is to be involved in schooling to any degree, at any level (a proposition I’m highly dubious of), it should be in the form of a direct grant to families/children. What they do with it will be their problem, responsibility, burden, or ticket to freedom.
Any other chain of custody of the money involves perverse incentives to doctor results, protect bureaucracies, coddle and celebrate the mediocre, etc.
If it is “our” money, give it (back) to us.
My Kenyan wife grew up in a village that still has no electricity, and a running water tap is a novelty.
She’s now teaching English (her third language) to American kids here in Detroit.
It’s NEVER about the money.
Great blog you have, btw. I just stumbled upon it today in Substack recommendations.
I think you're right: disintermediation of education is the only way forward. People have the right to fail but they should also get all the credit when they succeed.
Anything else and the schools become the One Ring. Whoever controls them can move the country in one way or another. Now, it's because our citizens can barely read and have been conditioned to free cheese and know nothing about American history or the Law.
And thank goodness for your Kenyan wife. I bet she's tough in the classroom and very, very good.
It’s the government controlled curriculum that kills education. When everyone has to teach the same content to an entire generation no student or teacher can develop true excellence (except in the curriculum that everyone “studies”). All students enter the labour market or “higher” education without any advantage. So schools cannot build a track record of real excellence.
Cancel gov curriculum (and gov funding when it comes with strings attached) and things will start improving immediately for everyone.
There are other issues but best to start with the big one
I can't disagree. In my mind, the problem is any centralized authority. Schools should be controlled by the local community. State capitals are too far removed and unaccountable to parents.
From a tutor and now learning coach I’ll say that it may have been to a certain extent “this way”. However, I do believe that the basics at minimum were taught. Now that isn’t even being taught in a way that adequately suggests that sufficient learning has taken place. Why did I have to explain that copying sentences doesn’t teach learning to write sentences and help kids develop their own thought about how something should be written. Copying isn’t going to help unless it’s to start to teach them how to actually write in pre-k and kindergarten there should be starter sentences and an understanding that sentences are made of subjects and predicates and should end in punctuation. The current state of the educational system for the us is well below subpar in comparison with other countries. It’s so sad!
As a 30 year educator, I will tell you that my biggest pet peeve has always been the way that the schools blame the parents while the parents blame the schools. As long as the fingers are being pointed, the children are lost.
The system is broken. Children are not inspired to learn because school is not inspiring. To reach more students, we must focus on their actual learning style and needs.
The greatest trick of public K12 schooling is that there's never one person you can fully pin a failure on, so everybody evades responsibility. Ultimately, thee kids bear the cost of our fecklessness.
I have a teenaged boy and every time I am on carpool duty I ask him and his friends to think about what it would take for school to become something they actually WANTED to do.
This is going to sound harsh, but they probably don't know enough about what they're missing out on to answer that question. My guess would be that what they are probably missing the most are real challenges.
I wrote about that here. As a boy mom, you'll probably like this one. <3
Also, just FYI in spite of the golden locks (which are a first for me as I approach 50 (I was a “high and tight” haircut guy for most of my life) I am a boy dad. It’s a small picture and I am totally aware of what my hair looks like in that picture so please rest assured that no offense is taken - indeed I actually take it as a compliment to my hair. 😂
Not harsh at all! I actually feel more positive about the district I am in than many others but the fact is that basically NO public schools approach things that way.
Consequently they (the carpool group who are all honors type kids) can’t come up with any answers as to what would make school actually GOOD in their minds. Part of it is also that they’re teenage boys of course.
Sometimes I wonder what would happen if school weren’t an automatic right - NOT that I want that of course but children who don’t have school as an automatic right seem most liable to really WANT to go. But I wonder if that basic fact can be leveraged in some way.
Part of the solution could be just a lot more variety of types of school and a requirement for parents and students to active have to make a choice about where they want to go. But I certainly don’t have enough research to back that idea up at this point.
Regardless I thank you for your link and will read it!
Well said. I teach at a large private school in England and it is no different. Education has become primarily transactional, more and more is expected of the teachers to shore up cultural, familial and political failings, and it is indeed disheartening. There must be another way that is not full time home school (although clearly learning cannot and should not be confined to institutional contexts).
At the very least, aware parents have to supplement at home. The most important thing they can do, I’m convinced is to remove screen time the read the same books and talk about them, together, highlighting specifically the things in the book that illustrate what is means to live a good life, in accordance with family beliefs, values, and ethics. With enough literature and real talk from parents, a kid might find his moorings early enough to achieve greatness in his life.
Agreed. Although I think there is a place for all of it - just like the understanding of a good book is greatly enhanced by having a learned adult talk through and provoke thought in the younger reader, the same is true of other "texts" like film, television etc etc. Screen time of course has value, but is far too often used, in home and educational arenas alike, as a tool to anaesthetise, with little guidance on how to consume it effectively.
When our child was two (and had memorized her letter blocks and asked to start spelling and reading words) I went to the nearest city preschool to learn about enrollment and curriculum. “Oh, we don’t endorse hierarchical systems here,” the teacher explained, when I told her our child was excited to read. “Systems? Such as..?” — I tried to understand. “The alphabet,” she frowned. Fortunately, we were walking distance to a Lycee, a school financed and staffed by the government of France. From age 2.5 to 12 our kid followed the French Ministry of Education’s curriculum. It was expensive; there was no PTA (bcs parent input is not valued in that system); we supplemented English with local summer school and lots of local library visits; and we studied French at our local community college to level up our skills. Yes, we are privileged to live near resources and to be able to afford and prioritize education. We had no vacations, new cars or big expenditures for 10 years. And would do it again.
It doesn't have to cost money. I regularly asked my kids about their school day. I played board games with them. I taught them how to make an outline and a proper essay. We went on book buying sprees at the salvation army. I taught them how to use a dictionanary and an encyclopedia, how to research properly. We engaged in critical thinking and had group discussions of many subjects. We also had some epic vacations. My kids were all reading at college level in middle school. We talked alot and used lots of vocabulary in my home, played word games. We all still love bad puns and allitetatipns. They are all now articulate critical thinking well rounded adults despite having attended some pretty bad public schools.
"Doing something about it" can't mean homeschooling for everyone, though I will unabashedly admit I prefer the K12 beast be starved of as many ADA dollars as possible.
What you did was heroic. You could certainly argue that by exposing them to the pants-on-head stupid policy of the K12 bureaucracy and the fake-as-all-get-out "care" meted out during school hours (but often negated in private and on social media) doled out by K12 leadership just long enough to push the kid through an increasingly incoherent system, you may have helped them grok some really important lessons about the nature of power, the necessity of accountability, the pitfalls of collectivization, and some of the hard truths about human nature, most importantly: actions speak louder than words.
You sound like a great (might I say "old-fashioned") teacher, a rara avis these days. Your students have been lucky to have you!
I was in college in the 1970s, and even way back then, I noticed that those students who were coordinated but perhaps not the most highly intelligent, often were physical ed majors. Those of quite modest intelligence, probably the lowest intelligence in any major, and who lacked coordination were education majors. We need to attract intelligent, dynamic people to the teaching profession, people with good knowledge of subject matter. I believe that abolishing the federal Dept. Of Education is absolutely necessary. Leave education to the States and communities, where it belongs. Give education dollars directly to parents, not to school districts.
An anecdote for you: My mother graduated from a two-year teaching college in North Dakota in the 1950s and taught school in a one-room schoolhouse without indoor plumbing or central heat. She worked for about 18 months, then married and left the area. Later in life, she returned to the teaching profession as classroom aide. She was assigned to work 1:1 with a 6th-grade boy who could not read at all and exhibited disruptive, sometimes violent behavior in the classroom. She succeeded in teaching him to read, his classroom behavior improved markedly, and the boy's parents were very happy. When the school discovered that she taught him to read using the old-fashioned phonics method, rather than the district-approved method, they fired her.
I was immediately infuriated by your anecdote, but then I sighed. It totally makes sense.
I don't think anything fixes this. I worry about parents getting money from the state because that gives the state the rationale to insert itself into the family home. Niggly detail, but what might work is a tax credit but only if it's significantly less money than the local public schools receive per child or we open this up to massive graft.
Really, we need to just take responsibility, which means paying our way as we find it.
I disagree with a few points in your comment and this thread.
I disagree with your broad generalization of Education majors. That was NOT my experience in the early 80s when I went back to finish my degree. Could be because I was in Canada and teachers were more valued than they are here in the U.S. The solution to attract more dynamic teachers is to value them more highly and not stifle them with onerous paperwork and the throttling of what they can teach. Paying them a proper wage would also help. They are not just daily child minders.
We are fighting against the abomination of the school vouchers system in NH that will bankrupt our public school system. I believe we need to be strengthening our public school system, NOT dismantling it. Parents should NOT be given education dollars to use as they see fit. Public tax money should support public schools.
I believe home schooling is NOT the answer, except in rare cases. It is definitely not an option for regular working people. Most of the inexpensive curricula are from far-right Christian Nationalist organizations. Even great curricula need adult assistance and supplementation.
P.S. The federal Dept of Education funds Special Ed and school lunches for students in need, among other things. If abolished, where will those funds come from? States are responsible for their own schools and curricula. In NH, small local school districts are responsible for what is taught, but that's another subject.
So, I advocate working locally to help strengthen our PUBLIC schools and help them be more relevant to the needs of children in the 21st century.
You're factually incorrect about the DOE funding school lunches and Special Education. You've fallen victim to the repetition of an incorrect, but oft-repeated talking point, I'm afraid.
I agree with your final sentence, but I also think that the only way to ensure that the LOCAL community remains in control of their schools is to decentralize funding. Local money should go to local kids. Who pays the piper will ALWAYS call the tune, regardless of whether or not the families with skin in the game like the music.
I think that you should try the Google. You will discover very quickly that the Federal DoE does indeed fund Special Ed. among other important programs as an assist to the states.
Your notion that local money should just go to the local school district was not something that you probably put too much attention into. That's great for wealthy districts, not so much for poor areas. Ideally ALL school districts should get the same support per pupil. Perhaps rougher areas should get more support.... Please reconsider your thinking... 🤔
Lady, the poorest schools get the most funding already and they are doing FORK ALL with it based on literacy and numeracy scores in Title I schools. I worked in two Title I schools for 13 years. Did you? In other words, do you know what you're talking about or are you one of those terminally "nice" teachers who thinks you can just shovel other people's money at education and improve outcomes, which I might add, is an inherently racist take?
You don't want to see any of this because you're still benefiting from the system and you need to believe you did good. The fact that you're protesting this much though indicates means you probably see what I do, you just can't admit it to yourself.
As for the DOE funding school lunches, it doesn't: USDA (that's the Department of Agriculture) through the National School Lunch Program.
Thanks, I can see that you are not aware of what is happening in other states. I also notice that you also skipped by my points about DoE.
I will not engage you further, besides mentioning that your first paragraph is utter hogwash and further shows that you don't appear to really understand.
I frankly don't care about your views because you clearly love your golden handcuffs and, so, are most likely deluded about your classroom efficacy (as many teachers are), but I'll clarify for the rest of my readers:
I misread her point about SpEd. I thought she was still talking about school lunches. Absolutely the DOE funds SpEd.But as anyone who's read the Constitution knows, ending a department doesn't mean undoing federal legislation.
SpEd will be funded, but the do-nothing counterproductive idiots at DOE are not going to be in charge of it any more. As far as I'm concerned, given SpEd outcomes, this will most likely be a win.
I was correcting my children’s homeschool schoolwork and making them working them through their problems until they got the correct answer when my mother-in-law chuckled and casually noted that when she was in school they never had to do corrections on their homework. Having been homeschooled myself, I had had no clue that was the modus operandi (for many decades it seems) in public school. I just looked at her in disbelief. Despite having only a formal high school education, I feel beyond qualified to give my children a quality education- though I doubt they would be able to pass the examination Laura Ingles Wilder had to pass in order to get her teachers certificate after graduating 8th grade.
I’m glad to see you posting this. Schools and parents need to hear this. As as 17-year teacher mostly at private schools in affluent communities, I see the problems you mention. I teach English, and kids are not reading. I’ll be reading more of your stuff. Thanks.
I think the headline stuff is so scary -- the comprehensive sex ed, data-mining through SEL, oppressed/oppressor binary -- people forget that the worst crime of all is that their childhood is absolutely wasted.
When "no one gets a zero" policies became de rigeur, reading became optional. We need to go hard on essay exams -- but no teacher wants to do that because the workload on that is insane if you're not a content expert, which few teachers are now. We're so far down the rabbithole I don't think public school can be saved.
It's up to parents to investigate the quality of the education being provided. If they won't do that, they get what they get.
Right now my admin and colleagues are going crazy with AI. I think I am the sole teacher resisting it. I won’t let my sixth graders use it. It won’t make them writers
Oh no. I busted a kid for stealing an essay from Chat GPT because he didn't know how to ask it questions that would get him and appropriate answer. Kids lack the foundational knowledge to ask good questions. For that reason, Chat GPT is a really, really, dangerous shortcut.
I knew this sort of thing would happen when calculators started showing up in classrooms. Now it’s AI. Technology is useful as a tool but it should not take the place of knowledge and thinking on your own.
This is why I homeschool, it is hard work juggling childcare, household duties, teaching duties. Even more so when pregnant or nursing infants, but it is well worth the effort to persevere.
It's more than that. It disempowers them as citizens. They can't engage meaningfully in any level of governance; their opinions will be ASSIGNED to them.
Even local politics become a challenge when a reader can't parse new regulations, policies, and laws.
While curricula play a major role in education, the bigger role is the intelligence of teachers. The students in schools of ed are “the dregs of the academic cohort” at any college (-former Dean, BC School
Of Education in a 1984 OpEd). This is why idiocies like socialism, “whole language,” “common core,” CRT, the climate hoax, etc., take root: idiots pick up trendy nonsense without thinking (because they can’t). And they think that since THEY had trouble with a subject in school (because they’re stupid), EVERYONE must be treated as a kindergartner… which only causes the bright kids to get bored & check-out.
As a career-long IT Services Project Manager (IBM, Disney, Sony, Sun Microsystems), more often than not I’ve had to edit/red-line and send-back documents written by members of my team, all of whom had at least a BS. Their writing approached atrocious, certainly nothing I’d give customers paying $MM for application development projects. And I’m of an age at which we still could test people for intelligence before hiring them. Smart? Sure. Educated? Rarely.
Does anyone else have their kids/grandkids in schools using the I-ready online programs in place of teaching reading and math??? It is very frustrating.
Because the standards we used to hold tightly to mean nothing now. By fully divorcing grades from demonstrated knowledge and skill, we're lying about everything important -- because your knowledge and skill MAKES YOU WHO YOU ARE.
Of course they're nihilistic; they are now what they consume, not what they produce.
I think screens are a huge problem and because of unsupervised screentime, porn is definitely warping a lot of kids' minds.
That one is up to parents. But schools need to play their part in telling children the truth about their performance, who they are now and who they COULD be, and then help them get there.
(Also, I'm very sorry about the Canadian schools. My husband went through them and, once upon a time, they were very good.)
I thank you might ask if they felt like they were being rage baited in a terrible way, cause they are. And if they feel bad cause they do. The ones that are ashamed have a conscience they are hurt the most. It’s an attack on them. They are the target market, know that.
FWIW, I very carefully talk to my male students about the deep harm porn can do to them in the long-run. There's only so much I can do though, since I can't police their device use out of school.
If I attack this at all, it's to urge parents to take away unlimited, unsupervised screen time. I actually have an article coming soon on that topic. <3
Fantastic piece. Especially because any teacher anywhere in the world could have written this. A profound insight into the reality of public school life, everywhere.
I wish it wasn't the truth in the United States, but it is. Our children are suffering. They are prevented from seeing their innate greatness. I'll never do enough penance for my participation in this system. Even as an outlier, my presence lent the system legitimacy it shouldn't have.
Everywhere? Maybe you mean in the English-speaking world? My spouse is from Poland and they have much better educational outcomes than the USA still. They still have traditional education and if you don’t learn, you don’t advance.
Well, our system is more or less a communist enterprise. They pretend to learn and we pretend to teach them.
I have no doubt your husband got a better education than most people in America. Even under the old communist system that would have been true if he was gifted enough.
I know Poland too. Of course you cannot say things in general, it is a way of saying. Yes, there are great places around the world. It's today's educational themes and topics mixed with AI all over the place that is too fast for all of us. It is out of control.
Private schools are the same. The AP curriculum has destroyed high school education. Parents believe they are getting an accelerated course for their smarter-than-the-average-bear child. They are not. All they are getting is very specific knowledge about the test, which is in the stupidest format in the world, made fun of by other countries, and is some cases doesn't even require the course to be taken. It does not teach mastery and the information is quickly forgotten by the students. Then there are the colleges. Parents who strive to get their child admitted to the Ivy League know children can't afford to have anything other than an A on their transcript, especially if they are white or Asian. It doesn't matter what the child learns in school or if they learn anything as long as they have the transcript to get them admitted - which requires APs if the high school offers them. The more the better. The entire high school experience and college experience is a sham. When touring recently we asked how the schools (Ivy's) were integrating technology into their curriculum to prepare the students for the world they would be entering. We received blank stares for students and admissions officer. The only thing they could regurgitate was "AI can be used as an aid is some classes." The students had been so programmed to think in terms of cheating they weren't even aware of the technological revolution taking place. It was depressing. When one girl at Columbia referred to the Inferno's circles as levels, my son laughed. This was Columbia University and it was a tour - and it cost 90,000 a year. The entire educations system is broken. DEI has taken over the system, and the teachers don't know what they are talking about. In my son's biology class they are teaching outdated science about things like chlorestorol. I have to deprogram him daily - in a 55K a year school. If you want to blame people here are the culprits - Administrators and the unions. We all know this. Beyond that - the NAIS, they "guide" curriculum choices and started the war on the Western canon, Bill Gates and his Common Core - he against deep learning, read how he actively kept teachers and parents out of the Common Core decision making process, the College Board, they make over 2 billion a year at your expense, and the government, both parties are corrupt, for allowing the Universities to become massive hedge funds, where educating kids is a byproduct, not a primary objective.
Yes to all of this. It's a huge knotted ball of nylon mesh to untangle, but at the end of the day -- and this is hard to hear -- we deserve it all for offloading our responsiblity for offshoring our children. We literally handed them our kids and said, "Teach them all the things." There was no way these mediocre bureaucrats weren't going to take advantage of that in every way they could. As far as I'm concerned, K12 is the Ring of Power. The State will either get everyone to go along with its agenda or dumb the citizenry down so hard it's damn ear impossible to mount an effective resistance.
I agree. I homeschooled by kids and started a small micro school for about twenty kids. But it is difficult to do and it does make it harder to get into college - which is a scam but also one of the only places your child can be with their peers. It is not so much parent's fault - it is the government. They took away the power for individual school districts to teach relevant skills and curriculums in the 1980s. The department of education was designed, not to help students, but to control information. Now school districts are hampered by bad, uneducated teachers, stupid admin and even stupider parent bodies.
I disagree that in public schools administration plays much if any role in the deterioration of education (perhaps different for private). In public schools I place the blame on unions for sure, but also school boards, and the programs where teachers are getting their teaching degrees. Also, the consultants who rake in big $$ on teacher conferences and trainings.
Dad of homeschooled kids * here. Just arriving to the stack/blog. Thank you. I hope you inspire a bunch of families who may still wrestle with the decision to get on with the process of educating their own kids.
My "kids" are now in their 20s. One finishing a PhD in math. One with a MS in public health, working for my state's department of epidemiology. And one who INSISTED on a BA in music from an area university who has returned to "community" college for a certification program as a medical radiology technician. (At some point late in his education, the arithmetic kicked in and he started doing numbers on pay rates...) Anyhow, success story for what inspirational value it may have.
The library of family memories includes both success stories and horror stories. Let me know if you want samples.
I'm just trying to tell them the truth. People like you are the inspiration. Please feel free to send me any stories you think are worth sharing (either that pushed you to leave the toxic K12 environment or where you've seen the enormous benefit of making the sacrifices necessary to homeschool.
I'm so glad you were able to make this happen for your children. It's a gift that I pray more parents will emulate and that the effects will ripple off into the future, the way this nation's founders intended.
Reading this as a British parent with family members who teach, it's very upsetting. Obviously we are a smaller country and centralising our core curriculum makes sense. We have never allowed students under 16 to retake a year, and all the important school exams (like our GCSEs at 16, and A levels at 18) are externally moderated, so a school cannot just pass failing students. No high school certificate here.
Nevertheless, for many years, schools in poorer areas and areas of urban stress were failing children, and nobody was measuring that publicly. Each generation went through these bad schools, standards of teaching and student behaviour didn't improve, and so "sink schools" carried on. Yes we had a Schools Inspectorate and local education authorities, (responsible for school funds and places) but they were not transparent or accountable to parents.
What changed for us was when a Conservative Prime Minister John Major established a national body that would inspect and publicly grade schools, naming and shaming. That is OFSTED. When Labour got back into power in 1997 (social Democrats, with a socialist tradition) they were also very focused on raising the education levels particularly of the working class, so they continued and also toughened the new inspection regime.
A percentage of students passing externally marked exams, at minimum grades, was set as a target for all schools. Schools with an easier intake (children arriving at 11 years old already on target in English and Maths) couldn't sit back and relax, they had to show "value added" by the age of 16, by showing real progression in grades. Every school has a published rating, the better schools put it on big banners outside. Parents have the information to choose the schools in their area with the better OFSTED rating (geography is how we allocate places), but of course the best rated schools are often oversubscribed.
If OFSTED rates a school as failing, it can be closed, principals sacked, schools could also be merged and teachers let go. Teachers are individually subject to inspections, as part of the OFSTED process (they pick a few subjects/lessons to sit in on) and teachers have to improve if their teaching is judged not good enough. It obviously creates a much more stressful working environment, and all teachers dread the arrival (not announced until the last minute) of OFSTED.
But, this has actually worked. We got rid of most "sink schools" (some very deprived areas still have poor exam results, but it's not a teaching failure) we stopped writing off working-class and ethnic minority kids in our inner cities, and raised standards in public education across about 25 years.
However, you will have guessed, the other magic ingredient, alongside more school accountability, was MONEY. Funds flow from central government here, and Labour turned on the taps. We had a good economy, teachers pay went up, we built new schools and resourced them.
So, in the UK, this public scrutiny of schools has become normal - and welcome to parents - and we don't want to go back. Our problems now relate to politicians underfunding education and also expecting teachers to be social workers, psychiatrists and police.
I'm very glad to see that these actions have been taken. If you don't follow them yet, you should watch Katherine Birbalsingh and Carl Hendrick's twitter feeds. They are very concerned about a reform bill that would apparently undo a lot of this progress in the name of social justice and trauma-informed practices. I spent some time in England as a young woman and I deeply love your country and the people in it. Thank you for this substantive and thoughtful comment. I appreciate the enlightenment -- I keep getting GCSE's mixed up with A-levels, but now I will be able to keep them straight.
Thank you, I knew I was probably telling you what you already knew, but I thought others might not know the UK education set up. Yes it will be a shame if we undo the progress, especially since it had become over the years a much less politically partisan issue. My teacher family-members have a mantra anyway - "it's all about the parents".
Congratulations. I’m very glad to hear that. I do believe that decentralization (local control) will generally lead to good outcomes. It’s small r republicanism and it should work. The problem is universal taxation requires oversight so we don’t see it very often because he who had the gold, as we know, makes the rules.
When my grandchildren were in the first three years, I was told that teachers did not correct the spelling and grammar in their written work. The reason was that they wanted the students to get used to writing, and seeing so many corrections on their work would make them give up and not try to produce a better written product. I made all the corrections at home and we discussed them. The children did not cry or give up. They became better writers. So much education needs to be supplemented at home.
Horrifying, isn't it? Both of my boys' printing is atrocious. They were never taught how to properly form their letters. We are working on this now, but it takes a ton of time to undo bad habits and form new ones.
I hope grandmas everywhere will come together as a cadre of support. You have a place in this war -- take it.
The failure of schools to teach the most basic of skills was a primary factor in my choice not to have children. My wife and I couldn’t afford to have one of us stop working to provide the intensive basic education we wanted for our hypothetical kids. I was helped enormously by my mother staying home until I went to kindergarten- I already could read and write before I went to school. Of course, our house cost $19,000 in the late 70s, which is why my mother could do this.
Tbf handwriting can be bad even with doing lots of it, like mine .. and its actually a skill of dying value (compared to typing).
You may not know this, but handwriting has huge benefits to learning (building neural pathways) that typing does not reproduce. Writing is muscle memory and another touchpoint (visual) and additional processing.
Well its definitely much more of a hand eye coordination activity and possibly more than that. But i would expect that between art/music class and learning write thoughts out into sentences (in any media), surely it would cover all the same bases?
Nope. The writing helps sear ALL KNOWLEDGE into memory, especially if you process it in a way other than mere copying. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-writing-by-hand-is-better-for-memory-and-learning/#:~:text=Studies%20continue%20to%20show%20pluses%20to%20writing%20by%20hand.&text=Handwriting%20notes%20in%20class%20might,handwrite%20words%20and%20draw%20pictures.
Oh, ok, sure like for purposes of memorizing/learning something specifically. However, i only ever actually had to really write in English classes (very rarely, history and for that what youre saying surely applies) but for those english papers, it was all literary criticism and the goal was not at all gaining knowledge while doing the writing, you already had the knowledge before you started, the purpose of the writing was learning how to actually write a literary critisism essay.
Two decades ago I had a raging argument with my daughter’s English “teacher” because I read her homework assignments, noted improper spelling, grammar, punctuation and composition where necessary and insisted on corrections.
This “teacher” called me to demand I stop this practice because I was risking my daughter’s “love of learning.”
I told this woman that my kid wouldn’t leave high school unable to compose a proper email or essay and she was welcome to come to my home to try to force me to stop.
That daughter is now homeschooling her three children. Those kids are blowing their peers out of the water. Granddaughter age 11 is doing three digit by two digit multiplication in her head. Grandson 9 is particularly interested in physics. Both are reading at “high school” level. Three year old grandson insists on being included so he’s in a pre-reading phonics program.
In another 15 years everyone will readily discern who went to bureaucratic school and who didn’t, and those who didn’t will be running the show.
100% !!!!
If much education needs supplementing at home, it makes you wonder why our kids have to sit in a classroom all day, doesn't it???
That was why I left. I saw all the opportunity cost of high school front and center with kids who should’ve been brilliant, but had been turned intro drones.
Unreal on the teachers part.
Good for you, mom. Your sacrifice will echo off for generations.
It’s very satisfying to see how my grandchildren are doing, particularly because I was an 8th grade dropout who finished university Phi Beta Kappa, magnum cum laude after being told by everyone I’d never get out of community college.
My grandchildren Will far exceed their more “acceptable” peers.
I volunteer as a tutor and for the last 3 years I've been working with the same student. Last summer I finally had enough trust from her family that I was able to pick her up on the weekends for the remedial math that I could tell from our sessions she hadn't picked up the first time around. I spent our first session giving her a basic assessment to see where she needed work - she started having trouble at subtraction of one-digit numbers, she didn't know her times tables above 5, and she didn't understand what a fraction was. Reader, she was 15. She's not stupid, she works hard, and she takes her education seriously, which was why she was willing to work with me every weekend in summertime.
In theory she is finishing up her geometry course this year. In practice I have *mostly* gotten her up to the standard her public "school" claims she is at, but if it weren't for me she would still think 1/4 > 1/3. I get the argument that parents are the ones responsible for their children at 7th and last, but surely after being forced to pay 20k/year/child for mandatory public education and being forced to send those kids there 40 hours/week for 40 weeks a year for 13 years, parents deserve to see *some* return on their investment. We shouldn't need private tutors to teach 15 year olds how to use numberlines.
Where I work, we teachers are working hard for our students. School is the center of a community. We lost a lot of that when we went into isolation. How do we all live together and get along and teach our future generations to do the same if we separate ourselves from each other because something’s not working? Do we solve problems by removing them from our lives or do we stay and fight for what we have and make it better? These things don’t happen overnight. Corporations sell the idea of virtual school and homeschooling as what’s going to save the children. I get that we have parents who are tired of nothing happening when their kids are being bullied or not learning. Therefore, the students leave public school and stay home. But you have to fight to change systems. Believe me, where I am, we are FIGHTING to produce better outcomes for our students. Our staff is on the same page: we will have a safe school where we have high expectations in work and play for everyone—-staff and students. We have students who lost so much learning during COVID, and we also have students who are allowed to be online for hours every day. These are just a few of our challenges. It’s a daily fight, but the rewards at this time of the school year are great. I know that parents are busy, and so many more demands have been placed on teachers. But being a teacher does not mean you’re a teacher to just the students. You are also a teacher to the parents, who many times are trying to figure the whole parent thing out.
If a parent has the ability to stay home, that’s great. But most don’t. Therefore, we must come up with solutions. One of them is to make sure that parents and teachers truly partner with each other, and to make all parties accountable. There are teachers, as in any job, who are just there for the paycheck. They make our job harder and they need to go. But the majority of teachers are here to teach and help students be positive community members.
Teachers are burnt out for sure. We need smaller classrooms and more teachers, less paperwork and more time teaching basics. We also need standards and curriculum that make sense for the age groups we teach!
As far as school boards, I’ve seen them make change when community members show up to the board meetings. This is the most political job out there besides actual government. We have to demand more, and when I say we, it’s everyone in the community.
I appreciate your heart in this.
Still, I've gotta tell you I've been down this road before.
The problem you're facing is that your plan to fix things relies on everyone doing what you think they ought to do, which you can't control. The system actively disincentivizes that for admin, teachers, and parents. Somewhere, a point of failure will emerge -- parents who will sue to stop you, or the majority just refuses to play ball, an administrator who's a political operative, teachers who talk a good game but don't do their part.
School boards are largely powerless in the face of regulation created by central DOEs from the state capital.
You're fighting an entrenched system that exists to grow and protect itself, and it does that best by making sure students don't do too well. When the kids fail, more money is allocated, more people are hired, more contracts are signed.
To the extent you can disintermediate what you guys do from what the central authority wants you to do, you'll have a shot. Good luck and godspeed.
I agree however parents must be involved. This child was clearly far behind for 6+ years. A parent must intercept these failures and find a way to correct it. Because the system won't.
Where else would it be acceptable to pay for a service (20k/yr/child), put in 40 hours a week, and still expect the parents to do this extra work evenings and weekends just to ensure that your child isn’t ridiculously behind? Yes, parents should notice when they are not getting what they paid for, but expecting parents to go above and beyond the mandatory cost and time of public school just to be at grade level (which is a dismally low standard) demonstrates a crippled system. This is unacceptable. Homeschooling is the answer.
Isn’t this half the problem though? Thinking of teaching as being a “service”? Of course in some sense it is (paying money in taxes so that a child can attend school), but it is completely different from other service industries to which you compare it. Teaching, done right, is far more than receiving a service for your spend; it is (or should be) a transformative, lifelong process of continual, critical involvement with reality and with our experience of this reality. That said, clearly public schools are not providing that either - and saying “it is the way it is” sounds remarkably defeatist; surely there is a middle way between schooling and home schooling?
I didn't say it was acceptable. But it is the way it is.
True, but where do you go when you bring up to the teacher AND the principal that your child is not where he should be and they both deny it and/or downplay it???
You homeschool.
I promise I'll be helping more with this very soon. I know lots of parents want to, at the very least, supplement their children's public school experience. Hopefully, what I put out will help them take that step.
You do it yourself.
Home schooling is not an option for most people. I looked into it very seriously. But I was a single mother and I had to work. Teaching is not easy, and it's a skill that has to be developed. Teaching your child is even harder. Mine had learning disabilities and emotional issues to boot. I was well educated and I knew my kid was not getting educated. But this is the way our society is set up. You work, your kids go to school, you barely survive. I solved a lot of problems along the way for my kid, but that was not one I could solve. It's just too easy to tell parents to do it themselves. If you can do that you're lucky. But not everyone is.
Education is not as complicated as it sounds. Your child needs to know how to read and be made to read. And they should drill math. Beyond that it's massively diminishing returns. Families need to find time to do those basic things. I'm not saying it is easy for all, but if you are relying 100% of the schools, your child is going to be poorly educated in 2025.
This is exactly right.
Your kid doesn't have time for you to fight the institution. It changes at a glacial pace.
You have to take the bull by the horns and do your best to supplement at home. The most important thing, IMO, is to figure out a way to get your kid reading widely and often.
You're going to have to take away personal screens to accomplish that though.
Maybe it's not complicated. That's debatable. It may be simple to determine what basic skills need to be taught. I agree that's the starting place, I'm not sure I agree that's where it ends. But any parent knows that it takes a lot for a kid to listen to their parent the same way they listen to a non-parent grownup. I'm not going to argue about parenting skills here and how parents should be able to command respect from their children. But let's assume for a moment that it is simple. That doesn't mean it's easy. Most importantly, it takes time. Time people don't have if they have to work full time. Which is almost everybody. The way our world is set up right now, this is the way it is. We need serious education reform. There's no going back to one room school houses and our society will not prosper if every individual family is deciding what their child will learn. The industries of today require higher math skills, analytical skills, social skills, and all of the things that public education in a country as rich as ours should be able to achieve, and it cannot be achieved in a homeschool setting. It's just not an answer.
Thank you for this comment. Not everyone has the ability to be home. I say make the effort to get involved in school. Demand it do better!
You can't really change much. If the teacher is ethical, you might be able to bring some pressure to bear so your kid gets his work properly corrected so you can take charge of helping him with basic writing and comprehension skills. Outside that? School boards are basically powerless. The state's regulations are preeminent and damn near impossible to countermand.
Public teacher here. Agree in principle but to be fair a huge number of the students and parents (and administrators, forsooth) actively (if quasi-unknowingly) DON’T want the education anyway. Oh they THINK they do. They CLAIM they do but ultimately they do not actually want it at the cost required (thinking, learning, working, etc.).
And that part sucks too. And the fact is that our current public education system is not good at all at getting them to understand that learning is actually valuable.
They WANT a piece of paper. They don’t seem at all interested in getting the education itself. They don’t see it as ultimately valuable.
I wish we would spend more time on what I think of as meta education - we should have a deep and continuous discussion about why we are here doing what we are doing.
The only place I disagree with you is that I feel like it may always have been thus. But I go back and forth. Regardless it is definitely disheartening.
I vacillate too between "we can fix this with solid policy" and "there's no point because there are too many variables in this inherently human-based endeavor."
But a HUGE part of why parents don't value it anymore is that we have fully divorced grades from the reality of a student's knowledge and skill. Since we did that, everyone thinks they're entitled to the paper, not that the paper must be EARNED.
If we don't stop lying to the kids, parents, and ourselves (that this is all okay because trauma or systemic racism or poverty, etc.) then we will continue slouching toward Gomorrah.
Amen, amen, 1000 times amen! 15 year ago teacher me would flip out that I am about to say this but I wish we could get rid of grades entirely - only because they are now more of a distraction than they are worth.
I have the same vacillation. Though I am QUITE certain that were I to open a school and run it by the simple practice of hiring good teachers and letting them teach while backing them to the hilt then everything would go well.
And in case any might wonder what a “good” teacher is then I would say it is any teacher I watch teach and deem to be good. Because I am one and I know what it looks like.
I also couldn’t agree more about holding everyone to the same account but I do think it must be admitted that the way current schools are funded is of extreme and fundamental disadvantage to kids in poor areas and that disproportionately impacts people of color because they are disproportionately poor. But if we just start treating this as a poverty problem ONLY while making sure that EVERY child in poverty has the same opportunity as every child NOT in poverty then it will all eventually work itself out. The idea on the left today that somehow skin color qua skin color holds people back from doing well in school smacks of a type of paternalistic racism that I cannot stand.
I truly don’t know if the current system salvageable but if it is then it will need an overhaul on the level of a full frame off restoration, engine, transmission and suspension total rebuild, extensive bodywork and paint as well as a new interior. At a certain point one must ask if it wouldn’t be cheaper to buy a new one.
Regardless, thank you for your work and I’ll be following you once I finish this note.
I don’t know about CA but here in Detroit, the one thing that is not an issue is money……it’s abundant. Everyone gets a turn at the trough. And we have some of the lowest levels of literacy in America. There are many, many problems with public education, but the idea that money can solve any of these problems is a curious one. Here in SE Michigan, the difference in outcomes between Detroit kids and those from the Grosse Pointes has far, far more to do with parental involvement and what their home and daily life looks like than funding differences between school districts. The rich kids can survive public education, they can learn (to some degree) despite their public schools because they can afford tutors, traveling, cultural activities and are simply exposed to a wider variety of experiences. Most people don’t learn most of what they know in school, and what is essential to learn (reading, writing and ‘rithmetic) is easy, and cheap to teach.
Which begs the question:’why are we locking them into rooms where they’re not learning. Much for 13 years?
As for the poor kids, no, it’s not the money. It’s DEI policies that make excuses for poor, traumatized, poorly parented, etc. instead of telling them, “you can do everything the GPB kids do. We will help you. And we will hold you accountable for not interfering in the education of your peers, as well as your own education.”
Why send kids to school? I appreciate having a safe, caring place where my second-grader is surrounded by friends and gets three recesses a day. Admittedly, in some domains, he finds his public charter school here in Detroit too slow, so we supplement at home.
With an undergraduate degree in theoretical computer science (applied math) and graduate degrees in law and American legal history, I could homeschool in most subjects—but I’d rather rely on a trusted school for 80–90% of his education and supplement as needed rather than take it all on myself.
I admit I’m surprised to hear such dire descriptions of education outcomes. I have been generally pleased with my child’s education so far.
You’re at a charter, so you’ve selected a school that is better suited to your needs. It has to respond to them more effectively than typical public schools do because its funding is lower the. They typically urban public schools. Charters need consistent daily attendance and must remain attractive to families who have other choices. It’s not surprising that you’re happy with this option. Im glad you find the quality of schooling your child is receiving satisfactory.
I guess there is no one size fits all, but my approach with my (highly intelligent but lazy)8 year old third grader who grumbles about (Catholic) school is that she is free to quit as a soon as she can answer correctly, and consistently, any math question derived from the 4 basic charts we have on the walls, as well as read anything I give her and write a coherent paragraph or two about the content.
So far, her laziness is trumping her desire to be free of school, but it is early yet.
My own education was a bit of “Educated” with some “Glass Castle” and Liars Club” thrown in. My highly educated, and Jesuit trained father wisely counseled us children that even if we just managed to learn how to play cards in the street after we dropped out we’d be better off than having gone to public schools…and that was the 70s.
Get rid of compulsory education.
If the government is to be involved in schooling to any degree, at any level (a proposition I’m highly dubious of), it should be in the form of a direct grant to families/children. What they do with it will be their problem, responsibility, burden, or ticket to freedom.
Any other chain of custody of the money involves perverse incentives to doctor results, protect bureaucracies, coddle and celebrate the mediocre, etc.
If it is “our” money, give it (back) to us.
My Kenyan wife grew up in a village that still has no electricity, and a running water tap is a novelty.
She’s now teaching English (her third language) to American kids here in Detroit.
It’s NEVER about the money.
Great blog you have, btw. I just stumbled upon it today in Substack recommendations.
I think you're right: disintermediation of education is the only way forward. People have the right to fail but they should also get all the credit when they succeed.
Anything else and the schools become the One Ring. Whoever controls them can move the country in one way or another. Now, it's because our citizens can barely read and have been conditioned to free cheese and know nothing about American history or the Law.
And thank goodness for your Kenyan wife. I bet she's tough in the classroom and very, very good.
It’s the government controlled curriculum that kills education. When everyone has to teach the same content to an entire generation no student or teacher can develop true excellence (except in the curriculum that everyone “studies”). All students enter the labour market or “higher” education without any advantage. So schools cannot build a track record of real excellence.
Cancel gov curriculum (and gov funding when it comes with strings attached) and things will start improving immediately for everyone.
There are other issues but best to start with the big one
I can't disagree. In my mind, the problem is any centralized authority. Schools should be controlled by the local community. State capitals are too far removed and unaccountable to parents.
From a tutor and now learning coach I’ll say that it may have been to a certain extent “this way”. However, I do believe that the basics at minimum were taught. Now that isn’t even being taught in a way that adequately suggests that sufficient learning has taken place. Why did I have to explain that copying sentences doesn’t teach learning to write sentences and help kids develop their own thought about how something should be written. Copying isn’t going to help unless it’s to start to teach them how to actually write in pre-k and kindergarten there should be starter sentences and an understanding that sentences are made of subjects and predicates and should end in punctuation. The current state of the educational system for the us is well below subpar in comparison with other countries. It’s so sad!
As a 30 year educator, I will tell you that my biggest pet peeve has always been the way that the schools blame the parents while the parents blame the schools. As long as the fingers are being pointed, the children are lost.
The system is broken. Children are not inspired to learn because school is not inspiring. To reach more students, we must focus on their actual learning style and needs.
The greatest trick of public K12 schooling is that there's never one person you can fully pin a failure on, so everybody evades responsibility. Ultimately, thee kids bear the cost of our fecklessness.
I have a teenaged boy and every time I am on carpool duty I ask him and his friends to think about what it would take for school to become something they actually WANTED to do.
This is going to sound harsh, but they probably don't know enough about what they're missing out on to answer that question. My guess would be that what they are probably missing the most are real challenges.
I wrote about that here. As a boy mom, you'll probably like this one. <3
https://open.substack.com/pub/educatedandfree/p/there-be-dragons?r=b8lae&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
Also, just FYI in spite of the golden locks (which are a first for me as I approach 50 (I was a “high and tight” haircut guy for most of my life) I am a boy dad. It’s a small picture and I am totally aware of what my hair looks like in that picture so please rest assured that no offense is taken - indeed I actually take it as a compliment to my hair. 😂
You are a modern Fabio, dear sir.
Minus the excellent body and good looks that he has (had?) I agree entirely! ;)
Not harsh at all! I actually feel more positive about the district I am in than many others but the fact is that basically NO public schools approach things that way.
Consequently they (the carpool group who are all honors type kids) can’t come up with any answers as to what would make school actually GOOD in their minds. Part of it is also that they’re teenage boys of course.
Sometimes I wonder what would happen if school weren’t an automatic right - NOT that I want that of course but children who don’t have school as an automatic right seem most liable to really WANT to go. But I wonder if that basic fact can be leveraged in some way.
Part of the solution could be just a lot more variety of types of school and a requirement for parents and students to active have to make a choice about where they want to go. But I certainly don’t have enough research to back that idea up at this point.
Regardless I thank you for your link and will read it!
Well said. I teach at a large private school in England and it is no different. Education has become primarily transactional, more and more is expected of the teachers to shore up cultural, familial and political failings, and it is indeed disheartening. There must be another way that is not full time home school (although clearly learning cannot and should not be confined to institutional contexts).
At the very least, aware parents have to supplement at home. The most important thing they can do, I’m convinced is to remove screen time the read the same books and talk about them, together, highlighting specifically the things in the book that illustrate what is means to live a good life, in accordance with family beliefs, values, and ethics. With enough literature and real talk from parents, a kid might find his moorings early enough to achieve greatness in his life.
Agreed. Although I think there is a place for all of it - just like the understanding of a good book is greatly enhanced by having a learned adult talk through and provoke thought in the younger reader, the same is true of other "texts" like film, television etc etc. Screen time of course has value, but is far too often used, in home and educational arenas alike, as a tool to anaesthetise, with little guidance on how to consume it effectively.
Read read read…and writing will improve.
When our child was two (and had memorized her letter blocks and asked to start spelling and reading words) I went to the nearest city preschool to learn about enrollment and curriculum. “Oh, we don’t endorse hierarchical systems here,” the teacher explained, when I told her our child was excited to read. “Systems? Such as..?” — I tried to understand. “The alphabet,” she frowned. Fortunately, we were walking distance to a Lycee, a school financed and staffed by the government of France. From age 2.5 to 12 our kid followed the French Ministry of Education’s curriculum. It was expensive; there was no PTA (bcs parent input is not valued in that system); we supplemented English with local summer school and lots of local library visits; and we studied French at our local community college to level up our skills. Yes, we are privileged to live near resources and to be able to afford and prioritize education. We had no vacations, new cars or big expenditures for 10 years. And would do it again.
Vacations are nothing when compared to an honest to goodness real shot at an education.
One of the things keeping me going in this depressing endeavor are stories like yours of people who saw the rot and did something about it.
Thank you.
It doesn't have to cost money. I regularly asked my kids about their school day. I played board games with them. I taught them how to make an outline and a proper essay. We went on book buying sprees at the salvation army. I taught them how to use a dictionanary and an encyclopedia, how to research properly. We engaged in critical thinking and had group discussions of many subjects. We also had some epic vacations. My kids were all reading at college level in middle school. We talked alot and used lots of vocabulary in my home, played word games. We all still love bad puns and allitetatipns. They are all now articulate critical thinking well rounded adults despite having attended some pretty bad public schools.
"Doing something about it" can't mean homeschooling for everyone, though I will unabashedly admit I prefer the K12 beast be starved of as many ADA dollars as possible.
What you did was heroic. You could certainly argue that by exposing them to the pants-on-head stupid policy of the K12 bureaucracy and the fake-as-all-get-out "care" meted out during school hours (but often negated in private and on social media) doled out by K12 leadership just long enough to push the kid through an increasingly incoherent system, you may have helped them grok some really important lessons about the nature of power, the necessity of accountability, the pitfalls of collectivization, and some of the hard truths about human nature, most importantly: actions speak louder than words.
Well done, mom.
You sound like a great (might I say "old-fashioned") teacher, a rara avis these days. Your students have been lucky to have you!
I was in college in the 1970s, and even way back then, I noticed that those students who were coordinated but perhaps not the most highly intelligent, often were physical ed majors. Those of quite modest intelligence, probably the lowest intelligence in any major, and who lacked coordination were education majors. We need to attract intelligent, dynamic people to the teaching profession, people with good knowledge of subject matter. I believe that abolishing the federal Dept. Of Education is absolutely necessary. Leave education to the States and communities, where it belongs. Give education dollars directly to parents, not to school districts.
An anecdote for you: My mother graduated from a two-year teaching college in North Dakota in the 1950s and taught school in a one-room schoolhouse without indoor plumbing or central heat. She worked for about 18 months, then married and left the area. Later in life, she returned to the teaching profession as classroom aide. She was assigned to work 1:1 with a 6th-grade boy who could not read at all and exhibited disruptive, sometimes violent behavior in the classroom. She succeeded in teaching him to read, his classroom behavior improved markedly, and the boy's parents were very happy. When the school discovered that she taught him to read using the old-fashioned phonics method, rather than the district-approved method, they fired her.
I was immediately infuriated by your anecdote, but then I sighed. It totally makes sense.
I don't think anything fixes this. I worry about parents getting money from the state because that gives the state the rationale to insert itself into the family home. Niggly detail, but what might work is a tax credit but only if it's significantly less money than the local public schools receive per child or we open this up to massive graft.
Really, we need to just take responsibility, which means paying our way as we find it.
I disagree with a few points in your comment and this thread.
I disagree with your broad generalization of Education majors. That was NOT my experience in the early 80s when I went back to finish my degree. Could be because I was in Canada and teachers were more valued than they are here in the U.S. The solution to attract more dynamic teachers is to value them more highly and not stifle them with onerous paperwork and the throttling of what they can teach. Paying them a proper wage would also help. They are not just daily child minders.
We are fighting against the abomination of the school vouchers system in NH that will bankrupt our public school system. I believe we need to be strengthening our public school system, NOT dismantling it. Parents should NOT be given education dollars to use as they see fit. Public tax money should support public schools.
I believe home schooling is NOT the answer, except in rare cases. It is definitely not an option for regular working people. Most of the inexpensive curricula are from far-right Christian Nationalist organizations. Even great curricula need adult assistance and supplementation.
P.S. The federal Dept of Education funds Special Ed and school lunches for students in need, among other things. If abolished, where will those funds come from? States are responsible for their own schools and curricula. In NH, small local school districts are responsible for what is taught, but that's another subject.
So, I advocate working locally to help strengthen our PUBLIC schools and help them be more relevant to the needs of children in the 21st century.
You're factually incorrect about the DOE funding school lunches and Special Education. You've fallen victim to the repetition of an incorrect, but oft-repeated talking point, I'm afraid.
I agree with your final sentence, but I also think that the only way to ensure that the LOCAL community remains in control of their schools is to decentralize funding. Local money should go to local kids. Who pays the piper will ALWAYS call the tune, regardless of whether or not the families with skin in the game like the music.
I think that you should try the Google. You will discover very quickly that the Federal DoE does indeed fund Special Ed. among other important programs as an assist to the states.
Your notion that local money should just go to the local school district was not something that you probably put too much attention into. That's great for wealthy districts, not so much for poor areas. Ideally ALL school districts should get the same support per pupil. Perhaps rougher areas should get more support.... Please reconsider your thinking... 🤔
Lady, the poorest schools get the most funding already and they are doing FORK ALL with it based on literacy and numeracy scores in Title I schools. I worked in two Title I schools for 13 years. Did you? In other words, do you know what you're talking about or are you one of those terminally "nice" teachers who thinks you can just shovel other people's money at education and improve outcomes, which I might add, is an inherently racist take?
You don't want to see any of this because you're still benefiting from the system and you need to believe you did good. The fact that you're protesting this much though indicates means you probably see what I do, you just can't admit it to yourself.
As for the DOE funding school lunches, it doesn't: USDA (that's the Department of Agriculture) through the National School Lunch Program.
Thanks, I can see that you are not aware of what is happening in other states. I also notice that you also skipped by my points about DoE.
I will not engage you further, besides mentioning that your first paragraph is utter hogwash and further shows that you don't appear to really understand.
I frankly don't care about your views because you clearly love your golden handcuffs and, so, are most likely deluded about your classroom efficacy (as many teachers are), but I'll clarify for the rest of my readers:
I misread her point about SpEd. I thought she was still talking about school lunches. Absolutely the DOE funds SpEd.But as anyone who's read the Constitution knows, ending a department doesn't mean undoing federal legislation.
SpEd will be funded, but the do-nothing counterproductive idiots at DOE are not going to be in charge of it any more. As far as I'm concerned, given SpEd outcomes, this will most likely be a win.
Here's what I wrote about the SpEd system as I've experienced it that informs my opinion above: https://educatedandfree.substack.com/p/k-12-will-always-fail-special-education?utm_source=publication-search
I was correcting my children’s homeschool schoolwork and making them working them through their problems until they got the correct answer when my mother-in-law chuckled and casually noted that when she was in school they never had to do corrections on their homework. Having been homeschooled myself, I had had no clue that was the modus operandi (for many decades it seems) in public school. I just looked at her in disbelief. Despite having only a formal high school education, I feel beyond qualified to give my children a quality education- though I doubt they would be able to pass the examination Laura Ingles Wilder had to pass in order to get her teachers certificate after graduating 8th grade.
That test is WILD isn't it?
I'm so happy for your children. You're starting to see it, but you're definitely more than qualified.
I’m glad to see you posting this. Schools and parents need to hear this. As as 17-year teacher mostly at private schools in affluent communities, I see the problems you mention. I teach English, and kids are not reading. I’ll be reading more of your stuff. Thanks.
I think the headline stuff is so scary -- the comprehensive sex ed, data-mining through SEL, oppressed/oppressor binary -- people forget that the worst crime of all is that their childhood is absolutely wasted.
When "no one gets a zero" policies became de rigeur, reading became optional. We need to go hard on essay exams -- but no teacher wants to do that because the workload on that is insane if you're not a content expert, which few teachers are now. We're so far down the rabbithole I don't think public school can be saved.
It's up to parents to investigate the quality of the education being provided. If they won't do that, they get what they get.
Right now my admin and colleagues are going crazy with AI. I think I am the sole teacher resisting it. I won’t let my sixth graders use it. It won’t make them writers
Oh no. I busted a kid for stealing an essay from Chat GPT because he didn't know how to ask it questions that would get him and appropriate answer. Kids lack the foundational knowledge to ask good questions. For that reason, Chat GPT is a really, really, dangerous shortcut.
I knew this sort of thing would happen when calculators started showing up in classrooms. Now it’s AI. Technology is useful as a tool but it should not take the place of knowledge and thinking on your own.
Thank you!!!! I can see some benefits of AI in some areas but writing is definitely not one. Thanks for sticking to your principles!!!
This is why I homeschool, it is hard work juggling childcare, household duties, teaching duties. Even more so when pregnant or nursing infants, but it is well worth the effort to persevere.
I'm so glad there are moms out there like you. Whether or not you ever recommend it to others, they see you and your kids. <3
I think that most of us over ~40, already knew this; We see it everyday, in every conversation, with young people.
Such a crime to paralyze multiple generations with gross ignorance.
It's more than that. It disempowers them as citizens. They can't engage meaningfully in any level of governance; their opinions will be ASSIGNED to them.
Even local politics become a challenge when a reader can't parse new regulations, policies, and laws.
Oh, I 100% agree, and my concern is THAT was the entire plan all along!
Me too. And that's why I have this Substack and plan to help any parent who wants to homeschool as much as I can.
While curricula play a major role in education, the bigger role is the intelligence of teachers. The students in schools of ed are “the dregs of the academic cohort” at any college (-former Dean, BC School
Of Education in a 1984 OpEd). This is why idiocies like socialism, “whole language,” “common core,” CRT, the climate hoax, etc., take root: idiots pick up trendy nonsense without thinking (because they can’t). And they think that since THEY had trouble with a subject in school (because they’re stupid), EVERYONE must be treated as a kindergartner… which only causes the bright kids to get bored & check-out.
As a career-long IT Services Project Manager (IBM, Disney, Sony, Sun Microsystems), more often than not I’ve had to edit/red-line and send-back documents written by members of my team, all of whom had at least a BS. Their writing approached atrocious, certainly nothing I’d give customers paying $MM for application development projects. And I’m of an age at which we still could test people for intelligence before hiring them. Smart? Sure. Educated? Rarely.
Does anyone else have their kids/grandkids in schools using the I-ready online programs in place of teaching reading and math??? It is very frustrating.
Yes, our daughter uses this for both bath and reading. However it is used as supplemental and not as the main diet.
Well nihilism reigns in the culture. That won’t help motivate kids.
And why does it?
Because the standards we used to hold tightly to mean nothing now. By fully divorcing grades from demonstrated knowledge and skill, we're lying about everything important -- because your knowledge and skill MAKES YOU WHO YOU ARE.
Of course they're nihilistic; they are now what they consume, not what they produce.
Tragic.
No. Nihilism reigns because the rite of passage into puberty is terrifying pornography and the equally upsetting realization of its “popularity”.
I think screens are a huge problem and because of unsupervised screentime, porn is definitely warping a lot of kids' minds.
That one is up to parents. But schools need to play their part in telling children the truth about their performance, who they are now and who they COULD be, and then help them get there.
(Also, I'm very sorry about the Canadian schools. My husband went through them and, once upon a time, they were very good.)
It’s not up to parents that’s crazy. It’s mission impossible We’ve been abandoned by idiot courts.
“Porn” hits teen boys different than anyone else. Believe that to your core.
As a mother of boys, I am deeply aware.
Have you seen this? It might be something you want to share around to people you want to shake out of their stupor.
https://youtu.be/5tdY_ct0qlo?si=0YNXrjlyuB3dxBRg
This pisses me off. Too little too late. How do people think its ok for decades? and no big deal? I am BAFFLED
https://open.substack.com/pub/boriquagato/p/the-case-against-porn?r=1izj1g&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
Here’s a link to in-school faq for grade nine sex ed in Canada. Gleefull nihilism.
https://thirstyforthetalk.org/
Oh wow. I clicked on your link and was truly startled. I immediately closed out of it because it’s too early in the morning to digest that perversion.
Ya. For your grade nine kids. Globe and Mail’s Robyn Urback wrote an article attacking Blaine Higgs and defending this woman on this issue.
I thank you might ask if they felt like they were being rage baited in a terrible way, cause they are. And if they feel bad cause they do. The ones that are ashamed have a conscience they are hurt the most. It’s an attack on them. They are the target market, know that.
Honest question: if you believe that porn is an issue why not say so publicly along with your other concerns?
Because I can only fight one war. K12 is big enough.
Right on. Everyone’s got a different reason to ignore this, but everyone’s got a reason. God bless teachers.
FWIW, I very carefully talk to my male students about the deep harm porn can do to them in the long-run. There's only so much I can do though, since I can't police their device use out of school.
If I attack this at all, it's to urge parents to take away unlimited, unsupervised screen time. I actually have an article coming soon on that topic. <3
Any parent who thinks they’re doing that is in total delusion. I think that’s the heart of the problem
Oh and the gaslighting of all these kids telling them not to feel any kind of way about it, it’s just healthy “adult entertainment “.
Fantastic piece. Especially because any teacher anywhere in the world could have written this. A profound insight into the reality of public school life, everywhere.
I wish it wasn't the truth in the United States, but it is. Our children are suffering. They are prevented from seeing their innate greatness. I'll never do enough penance for my participation in this system. Even as an outlier, my presence lent the system legitimacy it shouldn't have.
It is everywhere. It needs to be seen and said. There is hope, as millions of parents and teachers see. It is a new beginning.
Everywhere? Maybe you mean in the English-speaking world? My spouse is from Poland and they have much better educational outcomes than the USA still. They still have traditional education and if you don’t learn, you don’t advance.
Well, our system is more or less a communist enterprise. They pretend to learn and we pretend to teach them.
I have no doubt your husband got a better education than most people in America. Even under the old communist system that would have been true if he was gifted enough.
I know Poland too. Of course you cannot say things in general, it is a way of saying. Yes, there are great places around the world. It's today's educational themes and topics mixed with AI all over the place that is too fast for all of us. It is out of control.
Private schools are the same. The AP curriculum has destroyed high school education. Parents believe they are getting an accelerated course for their smarter-than-the-average-bear child. They are not. All they are getting is very specific knowledge about the test, which is in the stupidest format in the world, made fun of by other countries, and is some cases doesn't even require the course to be taken. It does not teach mastery and the information is quickly forgotten by the students. Then there are the colleges. Parents who strive to get their child admitted to the Ivy League know children can't afford to have anything other than an A on their transcript, especially if they are white or Asian. It doesn't matter what the child learns in school or if they learn anything as long as they have the transcript to get them admitted - which requires APs if the high school offers them. The more the better. The entire high school experience and college experience is a sham. When touring recently we asked how the schools (Ivy's) were integrating technology into their curriculum to prepare the students for the world they would be entering. We received blank stares for students and admissions officer. The only thing they could regurgitate was "AI can be used as an aid is some classes." The students had been so programmed to think in terms of cheating they weren't even aware of the technological revolution taking place. It was depressing. When one girl at Columbia referred to the Inferno's circles as levels, my son laughed. This was Columbia University and it was a tour - and it cost 90,000 a year. The entire educations system is broken. DEI has taken over the system, and the teachers don't know what they are talking about. In my son's biology class they are teaching outdated science about things like chlorestorol. I have to deprogram him daily - in a 55K a year school. If you want to blame people here are the culprits - Administrators and the unions. We all know this. Beyond that - the NAIS, they "guide" curriculum choices and started the war on the Western canon, Bill Gates and his Common Core - he against deep learning, read how he actively kept teachers and parents out of the Common Core decision making process, the College Board, they make over 2 billion a year at your expense, and the government, both parties are corrupt, for allowing the Universities to become massive hedge funds, where educating kids is a byproduct, not a primary objective.
Yes to all of this. It's a huge knotted ball of nylon mesh to untangle, but at the end of the day -- and this is hard to hear -- we deserve it all for offloading our responsiblity for offshoring our children. We literally handed them our kids and said, "Teach them all the things." There was no way these mediocre bureaucrats weren't going to take advantage of that in every way they could. As far as I'm concerned, K12 is the Ring of Power. The State will either get everyone to go along with its agenda or dumb the citizenry down so hard it's damn ear impossible to mount an effective resistance.
I agree. I homeschooled by kids and started a small micro school for about twenty kids. But it is difficult to do and it does make it harder to get into college - which is a scam but also one of the only places your child can be with their peers. It is not so much parent's fault - it is the government. They took away the power for individual school districts to teach relevant skills and curriculums in the 1980s. The department of education was designed, not to help students, but to control information. Now school districts are hampered by bad, uneducated teachers, stupid admin and even stupider parent bodies.
I disagree that in public schools administration plays much if any role in the deterioration of education (perhaps different for private). In public schools I place the blame on unions for sure, but also school boards, and the programs where teachers are getting their teaching degrees. Also, the consultants who rake in big $$ on teacher conferences and trainings.
Dad of homeschooled kids * here. Just arriving to the stack/blog. Thank you. I hope you inspire a bunch of families who may still wrestle with the decision to get on with the process of educating their own kids.
My "kids" are now in their 20s. One finishing a PhD in math. One with a MS in public health, working for my state's department of epidemiology. And one who INSISTED on a BA in music from an area university who has returned to "community" college for a certification program as a medical radiology technician. (At some point late in his education, the arithmetic kicked in and he started doing numbers on pay rates...) Anyhow, success story for what inspirational value it may have.
The library of family memories includes both success stories and horror stories. Let me know if you want samples.
I'm just trying to tell them the truth. People like you are the inspiration. Please feel free to send me any stories you think are worth sharing (either that pushed you to leave the toxic K12 environment or where you've seen the enormous benefit of making the sacrifices necessary to homeschool.
I'm so glad you were able to make this happen for your children. It's a gift that I pray more parents will emulate and that the effects will ripple off into the future, the way this nation's founders intended.
Reading this as a British parent with family members who teach, it's very upsetting. Obviously we are a smaller country and centralising our core curriculum makes sense. We have never allowed students under 16 to retake a year, and all the important school exams (like our GCSEs at 16, and A levels at 18) are externally moderated, so a school cannot just pass failing students. No high school certificate here.
Nevertheless, for many years, schools in poorer areas and areas of urban stress were failing children, and nobody was measuring that publicly. Each generation went through these bad schools, standards of teaching and student behaviour didn't improve, and so "sink schools" carried on. Yes we had a Schools Inspectorate and local education authorities, (responsible for school funds and places) but they were not transparent or accountable to parents.
What changed for us was when a Conservative Prime Minister John Major established a national body that would inspect and publicly grade schools, naming and shaming. That is OFSTED. When Labour got back into power in 1997 (social Democrats, with a socialist tradition) they were also very focused on raising the education levels particularly of the working class, so they continued and also toughened the new inspection regime.
A percentage of students passing externally marked exams, at minimum grades, was set as a target for all schools. Schools with an easier intake (children arriving at 11 years old already on target in English and Maths) couldn't sit back and relax, they had to show "value added" by the age of 16, by showing real progression in grades. Every school has a published rating, the better schools put it on big banners outside. Parents have the information to choose the schools in their area with the better OFSTED rating (geography is how we allocate places), but of course the best rated schools are often oversubscribed.
If OFSTED rates a school as failing, it can be closed, principals sacked, schools could also be merged and teachers let go. Teachers are individually subject to inspections, as part of the OFSTED process (they pick a few subjects/lessons to sit in on) and teachers have to improve if their teaching is judged not good enough. It obviously creates a much more stressful working environment, and all teachers dread the arrival (not announced until the last minute) of OFSTED.
But, this has actually worked. We got rid of most "sink schools" (some very deprived areas still have poor exam results, but it's not a teaching failure) we stopped writing off working-class and ethnic minority kids in our inner cities, and raised standards in public education across about 25 years.
However, you will have guessed, the other magic ingredient, alongside more school accountability, was MONEY. Funds flow from central government here, and Labour turned on the taps. We had a good economy, teachers pay went up, we built new schools and resourced them.
So, in the UK, this public scrutiny of schools has become normal - and welcome to parents - and we don't want to go back. Our problems now relate to politicians underfunding education and also expecting teachers to be social workers, psychiatrists and police.
I'm very glad to see that these actions have been taken. If you don't follow them yet, you should watch Katherine Birbalsingh and Carl Hendrick's twitter feeds. They are very concerned about a reform bill that would apparently undo a lot of this progress in the name of social justice and trauma-informed practices. I spent some time in England as a young woman and I deeply love your country and the people in it. Thank you for this substantive and thoughtful comment. I appreciate the enlightenment -- I keep getting GCSE's mixed up with A-levels, but now I will be able to keep them straight.
Thank you, I knew I was probably telling you what you already knew, but I thought others might not know the UK education set up. Yes it will be a shame if we undo the progress, especially since it had become over the years a much less politically partisan issue. My teacher family-members have a mantra anyway - "it's all about the parents".
Our local public schools are excellent. Our teachers are almost all stellar, best of humanity.
Congratulations. I’m very glad to hear that. I do believe that decentralization (local control) will generally lead to good outcomes. It’s small r republicanism and it should work. The problem is universal taxation requires oversight so we don’t see it very often because he who had the gold, as we know, makes the rules.