Rush Limbaugh — Another Outrage From The Public School System
Continue reading about Rush Limbaugh — Another Outrage From The Public-School System
The problem with public schools, however, is not lack of money. The real problem is that many of these schools are, in effect, an educational garbage dump. No matter how much money we pump into them, they will not improve because their foundations are rotten.
Continue reading about Public-School Excuse No. 1 – Give Us More Money
I certainly agree that when a parent gets involved in her child’s education, the child does better. However, consider that the average public school today gets about $8500 per student in school taxes. That is far more than the average Catholic or most other private schools get. It is far more than a parent would [...]
Continue reading about Blaming parents for public-schools’ incompetence
Does it matter that the student-teacher ratio in this horseback-riding class is one-to-one, if the instructor is an idiot or uses bad teaching methods?
Continue reading about Public School Excuse no. 2 – Classes Are Too Large?
School authorities often claim that American children do poorly in school because they watch too much television or because they have working mothers. But these excuses don’t hold water, either. Studies have shown that Japanese fifth-graders watch as much as or more television each day as American kids do.
Continue reading about Public School Excuse No. 3 – Working Moms, and Kids Watch Too Much TV?
But in the Harvard study, children were randomly assigned by lottery to private or public schools. As a result, neither poverty nor parents’ motivation explained the difference in achievement.
Continue reading about Public School Excuse No. 4 – Poverty?
However, minority parents often complain just as passionately that teachers don’t treat them with respect, that they give up on their children, and are only interested in collecting their paychecks.
For over two hundred years in this country, before public schools became entrenched by the 1890s, families of hard-working farmers, craftsmen, and even laborers managed to teach their children to read at home.
Continue reading about Public School Excuse No. 6 — It’s Society’s Fault?
The argument that vouchers, charter schools, and other school-choice alternatives might destroy the public schools is one of the best arguments for school choice.
The only system that can effectively handle diversity is the free market. The problem can be solved if private companies or former immigrants who now speak English set up local schools in their neighborhoods.
Continue reading about Public School Excuse No. 8 — The “Diversity” Problem?
et, when it comes to our government-controlled public-school education system, school authorities and employees defend the system to the death. One reason they may do so is because they personally benefit by the system, so are willing to turn a blind eye to its failures and overlook the damage it does to millions of school children.
If public schools had to depend on voluntary contributions from parents, most of them would soon be out of business. That is why school authorities fight tooth and nail to deny school choice to parents — they want to stay unaccountable to the public they allegedly serve.
As we saw previously, public schools resegregate because they continually fail minority students, year after year. Inner-city, low-income parents who work hard to move up the economic ladder, quickly relocate and move to middle-class suburban neighborhoods to find better schools for their kids.
We have seen how public schools fail and betray millions of children, year after year. The only “right” most public schools give to school children is the right to suffer through a mind-numbing, third-rate education for twelve years.
Continue reading about Excuse No. 12 — The Right to an Education?
These are only a few of the ways a free-market education system could help poor parents give their kids a quality, low-cost education. So school authorities’ excuse that we need public schools to ensure that poor children get an education, doesn’t hold water.
Continue reading about Excuse No. 13 — What About Children From Poor Families?
Parents who want quality education for their children cannot depend on a public-school system whose only real achievement is an endless list of excuses why it can’t educate their children.
The same psychology applies in government schools. No matter how bad the public schools are, they don’t go out of business. The educrats just ask for more tax money to “fix” what they think is wrong, and the schools stay open for another fifty years, wrecking our children’s education.
Continue reading about Teachers — Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is
The difference between government and free-market schools is this — when government schools are rotten, when they dumb-down our kids with nonsense education theories that fail, 45 million children can suffer for twelve years, without parents having any recourse. If and when an entrepreneur-owned free-market school is bad, only a handful of children suffer for a few months while parents shop for a better school — with parents having full recourse and freedom of choice.
As we might expect, teacher quality is far more important than class size in determining how children do in school. William Sanders at the University of Tennessee studied this issue. He found that teacher quality is almost twenty times more important than class size in determining students’ academic achievement in class. As a result, reducing class sizes can lead to the contrary effect of hurting students’ education, rather than helping.
Continue reading about Surprise — Public School Class Size Doesn’t Matter Very Much
