Let’s Google and Yahoo Our Kids’ Education
I love Google and Yahoo. With Google and Yahoo I can search the Internet on any subject that interests me, at any time day or night, in the comfort of my home. I was thinking how much fun it is to learn new things with Google or Yahoo, compared to the boredom or learning torture that public schools put millions of kids through every day.
Let’s consider the differences in how a typical child (we’ll call her Jenny) learns when she uses Google or Yahoo, compared to how she learns in her public- school classroom.
First, with Google or Yahoo, Jenny can explore any subject that fascinates her. She literally has the whole world at her fingertips. She can learn about tulips, cooking, dinosaurs, fashion, arithmetic, model airplanes, how to play the piano, or story books by thousands of authors.
When she is older, she can search dozens of Internet libraries, including the Library of Congress, for information on any subject under the sun.
In contrast, in her public-school classroom, Jenny must study only the subjects the teacher or school principal says she must study, even though these subjects might bore her to death.
Second, with Google or Yahoo at home, Jenny can spend as many hours as she wants studying any subject that fascinates her. If she likes flowers, she can spend all day learning about different flowers, how they grow, the best season to plant them, how sunlight helps them, or how much water each flower needs.
In contrast, in public school, Jenny usually spends about 50 minutes on each subject the school forces her to study. She has to go to a different class on a different subject every 50 minutes, even if she was interested in the subject she was studying in her previous class. This can strangle her interest in any one subject. For Jenny, public school turns learning into broken, disconnected bits of knowledge on subjects that often bore her.
Third, with Google and Yahoo, Jenny learns at her own pace. If she doesn’t understand something she reads about, she can ask her Mom or search Google and Yahoo to find the answer. She can spend as much time as she wants with a problem that intrigues her. Because she can learn at her own pace, she feels safe and comfortable learning with Google and Yahoo.
In her public-school class, however, Jenny has to learn all the material the teacher gives her in the specific time the teacher allows. Then (in later grades) the teachers will test her. If Jenny didn’t like to study the subjects the teacher told her to learn and did bad on her test, she can feel hurt and humiliated. She then associates learning with pain and humiliation. This in turn can extinguish Jenny’s joy in learning.
With Google and Yahoo, Jenny finds learning a constant joy. With public schools, more often than not, learning becomes a boring drudge or worse.
Government-controlled public schools will never give your kids the kind of joyous education they deserve, the kind your children can get in a homeschooling environment. At home, your kids can learn from Google, Yahoo, learning software, or hundreds of other low-cost education resources available to you right now.
So how can we Google and Yahoo our children’s education? Parents, you might seriously consider taking your children out of public school, permanently. Let your kids once again discover the joy of learning with education alternatives like Google and Yahoo, homeschooling, or low-cost, quality, Internet private schools.
I talk about all these great education alternatives for your children in my book, “Public Schools, Public Menace: How Public Schools Lie To Parents and Betray Our Children.”
Joel Turtel
Read more information about “Public Schools, Public Menace.”
Free Market Reading Center Puts Public Schools To Shame
In my book, “Public Schools, Public Menace,” I discuss the frightening fact that public schools in this country are turning out millions of students who can barely read their own high-school diplomas. Illiteracy rates in many public schools can range from 30 percent to over 70 percent, especially in low-income minority areas.
Public schools have twelve years to teach children to read even at a basic level, yet can’t seem to manage this simple task. The reason? — the whole-language reading method (sometimes called “balanced reading instruction”) used by most public schools today. Whole-language instruction forces students to “read” my memorizing words, like Egyptian hieroglyphics or Chinese picture-words.
Instead of having students use our miraculous and convenient alphabet to sound out each letter of a word and put the sounds together, the school tells students to make believe the word is a picture. Instead of sounding-out each letter in m-o-t-h-e-r and putting the sounds together, our public-school “experts” make kids look at and say the word “mother” over and over again from dumbed-down reading books, and memorize what the word “looks” like. Sound absurd? Yes, it is, yet this is the reading method public schools inflict on your children.
The solution, of course, is to teach children using a strict phonics method. The genius of the English language (and other European languages) is the way it simplifies learning to read by using an alphabet of only 26 letters. The letters really stand for sounds. Sound out each letter or letter-combination, put the sounds together, and a child can “read” the word. In fact, once the child learns the phonics method well, he or she can sound-out and then “read” ANY word. Powerful stuff. Children whose reading ability is crippled by whole-language instruction can usually memorize only a few hundred words. A child who learns to read with phonics, can read hundreds of thousands of words.
The proof is in the pudding. Aspen Learning Systems, a subsidiary of Knowledge Universe company, recently opened Colorado’s first privately-run reading center in Denver. Yes, that’s right, a school that concentrates on teaching kids to read. Aspen’s reading center gives kids a nine-week reading course that emphasizes heavy phonics. The result? In the first quarter of 1999, students gained an average of two years and four months in reading ability after they completed the course. Only nine weeks. Compare that to the twelve years your kids have to suffer through in public school, and still graduate with poor reading skills.
As usual, free-market, competitive schools that must prove themselves to parents who pay them directly, put public schools to shame. Parents, don’t settle for public schools when there are far better alternatives available to you in the free-market.
Read more information about “Public Schools, Public Menace.”
Public Schools — Why On Earth Do We Need Them?
Here’s a brief history of literacy in America that proves that we did far better teaching our kids to read before we ever had public schools in this country.
From the time the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620 until the 1850s, most parents taught their children to read at home or sent their children to small private or religious grammar schools. Education was voluntary and local governments did not force parents to send their children to state-controlled schools. Yet, literacy rates in colonial America were far higher than they are today.
In 1765, John Adams wrote that “a native of America, especially of New England, who cannot read and write is as rare a Phenomenon as a Comet.” Jacob Duche, the chaplain of Congress in 1772, said of his countrymen, “Almost every man is a reader.” Daniel Webster confirmed that the product of home education was near-universal literacy when he stated, “a youth of fifteen, of either sex, who cannot read and write, is very seldom to be found.”
After the Revolutionary War, literacy rates continued to rise in all the colonies. There were many affordable, innovative local schools parents could send their children to. Literacy data from that early period show that from 1650 to 1795, the literacy rate among white men rose from 60 to 90 percent. Literacy among women went from 30 to 45 percent.
In the early 1800s, Pierre Samuel Dupont, an influential French citizen who helped Thomas Jefferson negotiate for the Louisiana Purchase, came to America and surveyed education here. He found that most young Americans could read, write, and “cipher” (do arithmetic), and that Americans of all ages could and did read the Bible. He estimated that fewer than four Americans in a thousand were unable to write neatly and legibly. [5]
From 1800 to 1840, literacy rates in the North increased from 75 percent to between 91 and 97 percent. In the South, the white literacy rate grew from about 50 to 60 percent, to 81 percent (it was illegal to teach blacks to read). By 1850, literacy rates in Massachusetts and other New England states, for both men and women, was close to 97 percent. This was before Massachusetts created the first compulsory public-school system in America in 1852. (Of course, these literacy numbers did not apply to black slaves since many colonies had laws that forbid teaching slaves to read).
Ever since the first public schools were established in Massachusetts in 1852, and made compulsory in most of the states by the 1890’s, literacy among adults and children has been deteriorating. As I noted in a previous article, today the literacy rate for students in our public schools ranges from 30 percent to 70 percent. Compare that literacy horror statistic to the over 90 percent literacy rate for the average child, man, and woman by 1852.
The question to naturally ask is this: if our kids learned to read far better when we had an education free-market before public schools came along, why on Earth do we need public schools now? The answer is, we don’t. Parents should take advantage of the quality, low-cost, free-market education alternatives they have right now that I explore in my book, “Public Schools, Public Menace.”
Public-School Teachers Know Best — They Send Their Kids To Private Schools
Actions speak louder than words. If so many public-school teachers send their children to private schools, something must be very wrong with the public schools.
A new study reported that more than 25 percent of Baltimore and Washington, D.C. public-school teachers send their kids to private schools. The study done by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute found that nationwide, public-school teachers are almost twice as likely as other parents to send their children to a private school. The study also found that more than one in five public-school teachers send their kids to private schools.
Bored Boy and Girl at School
In the biggest cities across America, the statistics get even more startling. In Washington, D.C., Baltimore, and 16 other big cities, more than 1 out of 4 public-school teacher’s kids attend private schools. In some cities, almost half the public-school teachers do this. For example, in Philadelphia, 44 percent, and in Cincinnati, 41 percent of public-school teachers sent their kids to private schools.
Yet, across America, only about 12.2 percent of all parents who are not teachers send their children to private schools.
Now, why is this? Public school authorities keep telling us that they give our kids a good education. Yet they send their kids to private schools?
Well, teachers know best in this case. They actually work in the public schools every day. They see the kind of 3rd-rate, often mind-numbing education children get in these schools. Public-school teachers love their children like all other parents do. They want the best for their kids. So, is it any wonder that so many teachers send their children to private schools?
These statistics should be a warning signal for parents, a red flag waving briskly in the wind. If your children’s teachers are sending their children to private schools, should you be keeping your kids in public school? If the soldier-teachers in the public-school trenches tell you that there is something very wrong with these schools, you should, for once, be listening to them.
Actions speak louder than words. The fact that so many public-school teachers send their kids to private schools should be all the proof you need that it might be wise for you to look for education alternatives for your kids elsewhere.
If you think you can’t afford an expensive private school, you’re happily mistaken. Joel Turtel’s book, “Public School’s, Public Menace” tells parents all about quality, low-cost Internet private schools. These private schools are a great new resource for giving your children an excellent education at an affordable price.
P.S.: Like most hypocritical liberals, guess where Barack Obama sends his kids to school — you guessed it – to private schools – actions speak louder than words.
Success In K-12 School For Your Child
Odds are sharply against the average student achieving success in school in a public school compared with a private school. The most successful form of schooling is one-on-one home schooling. If you don’t have the time to home school your child yourself, internet private schooling with supplemental efforts from parents is the next best option. Public Schools, Public Menace will help you make successful schooling a reality for your child.
What Is Real Success in School?
Success in school is not simply measured in knowing the answers to test questions. Public schools require students to memorize and regurgitate information in a variety of essentially useless subjects. A smart parent asks, “What is the point?” This is especially true when two weeks later, your child doesn’t remember any of her test material because she was bored and realized she was never going to use any of this information.
Real success in school is loving learning and becoming a lifelong independent learner. It’s learning to read proficiently–not settling for the pathetic state of sub-literacy with which public schools leave so many students. Success in school is predicated on a less regimented environment in which a child is nurtured and not sucked down to the level of the lowest common denominator.
Additionally, children will not really learn, love school, or achieve success in school if they are afraid and uncomfortable. With the violence in schools, the drug deals taking place in the bathrooms, the bullies that teachers can’t control, and the aggressive presence of unwanted sexual education, children don’t feel safe. Read Public Schools, Public Menace and find the right internet private school for your child for as little as $850 per year. You’ll learn more about the benefits of home schooling and internet private schools and watch your child live up to his potential and achieve success in school!
School Choices
Many parents who are disappointed in or frightened by the public schools their children attend don’t see themselves as having any other viable school choices. They don’t like the teacher, the school, the curriculum, or the neighborhood, but they also don’t think they can take their child out of that school. If you’re counting on school choice laws, you’ll soon realize that a different public school is not the answer.
You’ll get hassled if you try to move your child. You may have to find a way to get her to another public school over an hour away. Or, you’ll just be moved to a different school in the same district, so the basic curriculum and environment will be the same. Public schools are essentially a monopoly controlled by a local Board of Education or government, so quality isn’t likely to improve.
Affordable and Exceptional Private School Choices
That’s why you want to send your children to a private school. Private schools operate in the free market economy–if they’re no good, they don’t get your business. As a natural result, the quality of private schools is enormously higher than most public schools. If you consider private schools, all of a sudden you have superior school choices–which means you can find a teacher, a curriculum, and an environment that suits you and your child.
It’s important to be able to choose what your child studies, as well as where and with whom. Public schools notoriously waste kids’ time with coursework they don’t need, don’t care about, and which don’t go at the right pace for them.. In “Public Schools, Public Menace,” you will learn how to find an affordable internet private school that will teach your child what he really needs and wants to know at a pace designed to keep him interested in and excited by learning. Don’t waste another year of your child’s life to find out about better school choices.
School Choice Will Destroy the Public Schools? — Maybe That’s a Good Thing
“Free education for all children in government schools.”
- Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto
Public-school defenders often argue that school choice would destroy the public schools. Almost 90 percent of children in this country attend public schools. If we had vouchers, no compulsory attendance laws, and an unregulated education free market, millions of parents might transfer their children to private schools. This would drain hundreds of millions of tax dollars from public schools. Those children left behind in the shriveled public schools would then get an even worse education than they do now. Therefore, the argument goes, we have to fight school choice to protect the public schools.
School authorities use the same argument against charter schools. Charter schools are public schools controlled by parent-teacher boards, not central school authorities. School authorities claim that charter schools, like vouchers, divert millions of taxpayer dollars from regular public schools, and can therefore undermine these schools. Public schools may have serious problems, school authorities say, but almost forty-five million American children attend these schools. Allowing school choice would “threaten” these children’s education.
Public-school apologists argue that, despite these schools’ never-ending failure and betrayal of our children, we should just keep using the same old failed solutions – spend more money, hire more teachers, and reduce class sizes – and hope we get better results (which of course we never will).
Public Schools Hurt Our Children’s Education –– So Why Keep These Schools?
In the meantime, what happens to forty-five million public-school children? In effect, school authorities’ don’t care about what happens to children who are forced to stay – but rather what happens to the public-school system if they are free to leave. By this reasoning, no matter how bad the schools get, we must not help children leave because that might make the public schools worse. That is like asking a parent to stop her child from escaping from a prison because doing so would upset the warden.
The question therefore is, do our children exist to serve the public-school system or should our education system exist to serve our children?
It seems that school authorities and public-school employees would rather protect an irreparably broken, failed system, than risk the security of their jobs by giving parents real school choice. We can certainly understand public-school employees wanting to keep their guaranteed job security. However, should we sacrifice our children’s education and future to keep failed public schools in business?
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. Government-controlled public schools, not school choice, can cripple our children’s education and banish millions of inner-city kids to a lifetime of poverty and ignorance. We need to scrap the public school system, once and for all, and the sooner the better.
The Charter School Wars — Why Public Schools Hate Charter Schools
Parents – please consider if you want to wait around this long while your children suffer through twelve years of public school.
How Public Schools Assault Christian Values
Is there anything wrong with lying, cheating, stealing, shop-lifting, taking drugs, premarital sex, insulting your parents, pornography, irresponsibility, or getting pregnant in junior high school? Not according to the values taught to children in many public schools today.
From the earliest times in America, teachers have believed that schools should teach moral values. What good is a child who knows when Columbus discovered America but can’t tell right from wrong? The most popular reading instruction books in the nineteenth century were the “McGuffy Readers,” which taught children to read through stories of increasing complexity. Each story also taught children a moral lesson about values such as honesty, hard work, integrity, perseverance, compassion, obedience to parents, respect for others’ rights, and indi-vidual responsibility. Up to the 1930s, most schools in America reinforced the Judeo-Christian values most parents taught their children at home.
Today, many school authorities seem to have contempt for religion and traditional moral values. They force children to endure years of “values clarification” classes, which teach children that all moral values are subjective and meaningless. Many teacher-facilitators, as some now prefer to call themselves, teach kids that whatever feels good at the moment or whatever the group considers acceptable is a “good” value.
Most parents, when asked in surveys, say they want schools to teach their children such traditional Western values as honesty, hard work, integrity, justice, self control, responsibility, respect for parents, and fidelity in marriage. Unfortunately, those values are not what most public schools teach.
Values-clarification programs often pretend to teach children real values to pacify parents, but textbooks used in values-clarification classes often censor or distort traditional family and religious values. Dr. Paul Vitz did a study on these textbooks, funded by the National Institute of Education.Vitz discovered that traditional family and Judeo-Christian values had been eliminated from children’s textbooks. He studied forty social studies textbooks used by first to fourth-grade public-school students and found no mention of the words “marriage,” “wedding,” “husband,” or “wife.” These textbooks commonly defined a “family” simply as a group of people.
Values clarification (sometimes now called “character education” or other names, depending on the public school)differs radically from traditional moral codes because it claims that children do not need established values to make moral choices. Values clarification teachers don’t care which values children choose because in their view all values are subjective. The right value, they assert, depends on the situation and the individual — a value is good if it “works” for a particular child at a particular time.
To many values clarification teacher-facilitators, cheating, lying, stealing, or having casual sex with other students are not bad acts in themselves. Such actions are just unfortunate choices that students make, depending on circumstances and personality traits, out of many alternative moral choices. Abiding by the Ten Commandments is merely one such option.
Values clarification classes deliberately teach children to be nonjudgmental about moral values. Values-clarification debates often turn into “bull” sessions where each student gives their opinion about a moral issue but conclusions are never reached. In these classes, the teacher-facilitator often acts like a talk-show host who gets the students to debate such topics as the merits or bad consequences of stealing, lying, pre-marital sex, or taking drugs.
In sex-education classes, sexual behavior is often described in purely mechanical terms and sexual choices are presented as morally neutral options or simply personal preferences each student has to decide for themselves. Similarly, in many drug-education programs the same non-judgemental attitude often prevails — students are encouraged to talk about the good and bad consequences of taking drugs without reaching a clear moral conclusion.
Many public schools teach children that only self gratification and their feelings of the moment matter, that there are no moral absolutes. Admittedly, some parents are to blame for not teaching their children good ethical values, but values clarification programs are an assault on the time-tested values most parents teach their children.
Since ancient times, all societies have known that certain acts are inherently wrong and immoral. This knowledge became embedded in a cultural or religious moral code, which recognized that human beings must respect each other’s person and property. Judaism and Christianity, for example, teach that lying, stealing, or murdering another human being is wrong, not only because they’re prohibited by the Ten Commandments, but because they are inherently unjust to other human beings.
With rare exceptions, such as killing in self-defense, the morality of these basic values seldom depends on the situation or the individual. All of us are born with the same rights to life, liberty, and property. Respect for each other’s rights and person simply reflects this fact of life.
Because values clarification programs teach children that all values are subjective, they destroy real values and corrupt children at the deepest level. If all values are subjective, there is no moral difference between mercy and murder, honesty and theft, sexual consent and rape, loyalty and treachery, or fidelity and adultery.
In a world where anything goes, children are turned into amoral creatures who will do anything to satisfy their momentary desires. Yet these are the insidious moral anti-values that public schools now promote with values-clarification classes.
Pagan Religions Taught In Public Schools
In classrooms throughout the country, Judeo-Christian beliefs are often cast aside or ridiculed. Multiculturalism studies, environmental propaganda, and Save-the-Earth classes now indoctrinate children with New-Age religious beliefs, often without parents’ knowledge. Public schools sometimes try to sneak offensive pagan or new-age religions into their curriculum without parents’ knowledge under the guise of multiculturalism studies.
In January, 2003, a group of parents sued a Sacramento Unified School District because certain teachers at their local elementary school were aggressively, and secretly, teaching anthroposophy, a religion that combines traditional Western religion with astrology and New Age religion. Pacific Justice Institute lawyers representing the parents indicated that many other public schools in California are now adding New Age and Eastern religions, including Islam, to their curricula.
Below is only a small sample of the flood of “spiritual” sessions taking place in classrooms throughout the country (examples are from Berit Kjos’s book, Brave New Schools):
Altered states of consciousness: Teaching students to alter their consciousness through centering exercises, guided imagery, and visualizations has become standard practice in self-esteem, multicultural, and arts programs. They often encourage contact with spirit guides.
Dreams and visions: After studying a pagan myth, students are often asked to imagine or visualize a dream or vision, then describe it in a journal or lesson assignment.
Astrology: Countless teachers across the country require students to document their daily horoscopes. Others help students discover their powers and personalities through Aztec calendars and Chinese.
Other forms of divination: Through palmistry, I Ching, tarot cards and horoscopes, students learn to experience other cultures and tap into secret sources of wisdom. Students in Texas were told to create a vision in their minds and “describe in your best soothsayer tones the details of your vision.”
Spiritism: While pagan myths and crafts show students how to contact ancestral, nature, and other spirits, classroom rituals actually invoke their presence. California third-graders had to alter their consciousness through guided imagery, invoke or “see” their personal animal spirits, write about their experience . . . and create their own magical medicine shields to represent their spirit helper.
Magic, spells, and sorcery: Many parents consider magic and spell-casting too bizarre and alien to pose a threat, yet gullible students from coast to coast are learning the ancient formulas and occult techniques.
Parents, is this what you want your children taught in public schools, the same public schools that are now forbidden from teaching kids the Ten Commandments?
Compulsory Attendance Laws Violate Parents’ Rights
Compulsory-attendance laws force parents to send their children to public schools. These laws presume that the politicians we vote into office, our agents, have the right to take away parents’ liberty and inalienable rights. Compulsory education means that in America, contrary to the common view, we no longer live in the land of the free. Local and state governments that claim the right to control our children’s education also claim, in effect, that they own our children’s minds and lives for twelve years. That is an appallingly arrogant claim, especially in America.
One reason public schools get away with educational murder, year after year, is because local governments violate parents’ liberty and parental rights with impunity. Local governments don’t own or run food stores, auto showrooms, office-supply stores, or pre-schools and private colleges in America. Yet they own the public schools and control 1st through 12th grade education in America.
Should idiot bureaucrats dictate how we educate our children?
Do government officials have any right to dictate how we should educate our children? To answer this question, we have to examine what our Founding Fathers understood to be the real function of government. In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson clearly stated the moral nature and purpose of government:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness-that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. . . .”
The Declaration of Independence affirms that we have natural rights as human beings to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” It establishes the principle that we, the people, acting individually and by free consent, created our government only to protect and secure our natural rights as human beings. That is government’s sole legitimate function.
Look again at the phrase from the Declaration that says, “governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” The “governed” means all the people, not just some, not a minority, and not a majority. It means that all citizens, including parents, have the same inalienable rights.
Is government your master or agent?
That phrase also means that government is our agent, not our master. It means that we, as free human beings, voluntarily grant limited powers to government for a specific purpose, to protect our natural rights. It means that government should only have those powers we specifically grant to it for that purpose. Yet, nowhere in the Constitution is the word “education” mentioned. The Constitution did not give the federal government any right or power to control how parents educate their children. By implication, state governments do not have any such right or power either, because such a power would violate our fundamental liberties.
Nature and justice confirm that parents have the right to decide who educates their children. Like parents of all species, most human parents protect and nurture their children and teach them the skills and knowledge they need to survive. Parents in all cultures make teaching their children a first priority. Since reading, writing, and arithmetic are skills needed to prosper in a modern society, it stands to reason that most parents will find a way to teach these skills to their children if the means are available.
Surprise — Public School Class Size Doesn’t Matter Very Much
School authorities often complain that classes are too large. They claim that teachers can’t be expected to give their students the individual attention they need if there are too many students in the class. On the surface, this excuse seems to have some merit. Common sense tells us that in smaller classes, teachers can give more time and attention to each student.
However, many studies show that smaller class size does not guarantee that children get a better education. The pupil-to-teacher ratio in public schools in the mid-1960s was about 24 to 1. This ratio dropped to about 17 to 1 by the early 1990s, which means the average class size fell by 28 percent. Yet, during the same time period, SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) test scores fell from 954 to 896, a decline of 58 points or 6 percent. In other words, student academic achievement (as measured by SAT scores) dropped at the same time that class sizes got smaller.
Eric Hanushek, a University of Rochester economist, examined 277 published studies on the effects of teacher-pupil ratios and class-size averages on student achievement. He found that only 15 percent of these studies showed a positive improvement in achievement with smaller class size, 72 percent found no statistically significant effect, and 13 percent found a negative effect on achievement.
It seems to go against common sense that student academic achievement could drop with smaller class sizes. One reason this happens in public schools is that when class sizes drop, schools have to create more classes to cover all the students in the school. Schools then have to hire more teachers for the increased number of classes. However, public schools across the country are already having trouble finding qualified teachers to fill their classrooms. As a result, when reduced class sizes increase the need for more teachers, schools then often have to hire less-qualified teachers.
Teacher Quality and Teaching Methods Are Far More Important
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.
Similarly, a study on class size by policy analyst Jennifer Buckingham of the Sydney-based Center for Independent Studies found no reliable evidence that students in smaller classes do better academically or that teachers spend significantly more time with them in these classes. Buckingham concluded that a 20 percent class-size reduction cost the Australian government an extra $1,150 per student, yet added only an additional two minutes of instruction per day for each child.
Reducing class sizes can’t solve the underlying problems with public schools. No matter how small classes become, nothing will help if the teachers are ill-trained or their teaching methods are useless or destructive. For example, if teachers use whole-language or balanced reading instruction, they can cripple students’ ability to read no matter how small the classes are. Even if classrooms had one teacher for every student, that child’s ability to read could still be crippled if the teacher used these reading-instruction methods. In fact, smaller class sizes could give the teacher more time to hurt (not intentionally) each student’s reading ability.
Here’s an analogy on this issue of class size vs. teaching methods: Suppose a horseback-riding instructor was teaching one little girl to ride. This instructor’s teaching method was to tell the bewildered girl to sit backwards on the horse, facing the horse’s rump, and control the horse by holding its tail. 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?
Public Schools — Our Education Garbage Dump
Suppose a contractor was building a house for you, and for some strange reason he convinced you to build your house on a garbage dump. The house was supposed to cost $150,000 to build, but the contractor is having problems. Every time he tries to lay his foundations, the foundations sink in the earth that has been rotted out by garbage.
So the contractor keeps trying new ways to fortify the earth to hold the foundations. He tries steel rods in the earth. He tries a different kind of concrete. But everything he tries doesn’t work because the garbage dump simply won’t support any foundation he tries to pour. Every time the contractor tries something new, the price of the house escalates. His “experiments” push the price to $350,000. Of course you are getting disgusted and think maybe the problem is a structural one that can’t be fixed — that you’ll never be able to sink a solid foundation on a garbage dump.
The contractor, who doesn’t seem to have a waiting list of other customers, keeps saying if you give him another $100,000, then another $100,000, he is sure he’ll be able to come up with a way to lay your foundation and build your house. But you are bankrupt by now, so you have to walk away from the house.
The same scenario has been running for the past fifty years in our education garbage dumps called public schools. As the education they’re giving our kids gets progressively worse, the educrats and Boards of Education keep whining in unison that they don’t have enough money to do a good job, the schools are overcrowded, teachers salaries are too “low,” millions are needed to repair the dilapidated schools, and on and on.
“Just give us more money,” the educrats whine. “Look at the condition of our schools. See how overcrowded they are. How do you expect to get good teachers if you don’t pay them more? All we need is more money, more billions. Then we will teach your children better.” It’s the same chant, over and over again. It is one of the favorite excuses spewed out by the educational establishment to rationalize the failure of public schools.
The problem is that our public schools are a government-controlled education garbage dump. No matter how much money we pump into them, they will not improve because the foundations of the system are structurally rotten. They will not improve because a government-run system, by its nature, strangles educational quality and innovation.
Innovation only comes from the fierce competition of a free market. That’s why our cars, food, and computers, keep improving in quality every year. Every manufacturer who competes for your consumer dollar has to constantly improve his products to convince you to buy from him. Every car or computer maker must prove to you that his product is better, safer, or cheaper than his competitors. The only way he can do this, and maintain your loyalty as a customer year after year, is to live up to his promises. Competition constantly drives the free-market to continually improve quality, competence, and innovation in all the products we buy.
Public schools, in contrast, are government-owned and operated as a monopoly. There is little competition. The schools get their students by force, through compulsory attendance laws. They get their funds by force, through compulsory real estate taxes. If the school is incompetent, it does not go out of business. If the tenured teachers are incompetent, it’s almost impossible to fire them.
Most private schools are expensive. Also, parents who struggle to send their kids to private school still have to pay compulsory real estate taxes to “support” public schools. The average family pays almost forty percent of their income in taxes, leaving little extra for private schools. That’s why most parents can’t afford these schools. The high taxes force both parents into the workforce, making it difficult for one parent to stay at home to home-school their children. As a result, government schools may not have a legal monopoly to educate our kids, but they have a de-facto monopoly, and the educrats know this.
That is why the educrats can experiment on our kids like guinea pigs, trying out every wacko educational theory their teacher colleges dream up. One such theory was the disastrous “whole-language” reading instruction method that turned millions of kids into illiterates. That is their idea of “innovation.”
The only problem is that their “innovations” are not tested in the crucible of the free market. Parents are not given the right or ability to accept or reject these “innovations” by public-school commissars. If the educrats’ “innovation” doesn’t work, and parents think the school is incompetent, the school doesn’t go out of business.
To cover their embarrassment at the constant failure of these “innovations,” the educrats then blame everyone but themselves. They blame the kids, the parents, “poverty,” or “society.” Or, they say they need more billions of dollars to try a new variation of the “innovation” that didn’t work for the last ten years. Parents can’t take their kids out of these failed schools because they can’t afford the private schools. The free-market can’t punish these public schools for their incompetence and poor results because these schools are an insulated government monopoly and the teachers are protected by tenure.
If government schools ruin children’s education and futures with their failed policies, why give them more billions of dollars? In fact, giving public schools more money to continue their education crimes against our kids would be criminal. It would be like giving more money to a drug addict so he could buy more cocaine and do more damage to his brain.
What matters is what the schools teach, how they teach, and if they are held accountable for what they teach. In government schools, there is no accountability. It is only government institutions like public schools that have the audacity to ask for more billions of dollars the worse they get. In effect, they profit from their incompetence.
But the educrats cannot do otherwise. If they don’t ask for more money, they can’t use money as an excuse, and are admitting failure. If they admit failure, they are admitting the failure of the entire government-school system. Just as the communists in the former Soviet Union could not admit failure, so public-school educrats cannot admit failure. They must make a constant stream of excuses why our children are being turned into illiterates, and why they waste twelve years of our children’s lives. They must constantly ask for more billions of dollars to “improve” the system, even though the government-controlled system is beyond repair.
Here’s one example of the “value” of giving more money to public schools. In 1984, as a result of a desegregation lawsuit and orders from U.S. District Judge Russell Clark, . . . “Kansas City spent $2 billion building the most expensive school system in the world. Beginning teacher salaries rose from a low of $17,000 to a high of $47,851. Fifteen new schools were constructed and 70 had additions or renovations. The luxurious facilities include a planetarium, a vivarium, greenhouses, a model United Nations wired for language translation, radio and television studios, movie editing and screening rooms, swimming pools, a zoo, a farm, a wildland area, a temperature-controlled art gallery, and 15 computers per classroom. Students can study Suzuki violin, animal science, and robotics. Language instruction spans French to Swahili.”
Bored at Public School
“Despite the extraordinary facilities and massive sums of money, student performance is so low that recently the state had to strip the Kansas City School District of its accreditation. The school district has fewer students and is less integrated that in 1984 when Judge Clark took control of the school district in order to achieve “mathematical racial balance.” (Paul Craig Roberts, The Washington Times, Dec., 9, 1999).
This is just one example of many. If a school’s competence and teaching methods are not put to the test of free-market competition, if schools are not punished for incompetence by going out of business, if teachers are not punished for incompetence by being fired, no amount of money in the world will improve the schools. Only the free market will.
The best thing we can do for our kids is to shut down the public-school garbage dumps permanently, once and for all. Let each parent pay for their own child’s education in a low-cost, competent, vibrant, and fiercely competitive free-market education system.
Public-School Exremists with a Mission
One reason public schools get away with educational failure, year after year, is because they are run by school officials who passionately believe in what they are doing. As the great English writer C. S. Lewis wrote, “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. Those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
Public-school true believers often fall into this category – for over a hundred years, education “experts” have been tormenting our children with public schools, allegedly for the children’s benefit. Like all true believers, these people believe that they know what is best for our children and society, and seek to enforce their beliefs on parents.
From the 1850s to the 1920s, public-school activists such as Horace Mann and John Dewey worked to create a public-school system like the one they admired in Prussia (Germany). Mann and Dewey considered public education a religion, with a holy mission to mold children and society. Simply teaching children to read, write, and do math was too commonplace a goal for them. Mann and Dewey wanted the schools to have total control over children’s lives. This meant removing parents’ influence over their children. Mann put it this way: “We who are engaged in the sacred cause of education are entitled to look upon all parents as having given hostages to our cause.”
Dewey also had a utopian vision for America and he wanted the common schools to achieve his vision. To create a socialist America, public schools had to mold generations of children into the habit of obedience. In his Pedagogic Creed of 1897, Dewey wrote, “Every teacher should realize he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of the proper social order and the securing of the right social growth. . .”
Public Schools Expand Their Control Over Our Children
By the early twentieth century, public schools had expanded their functions into areas undreamed of in the 1850s. Schools took on the role of social agencies, with nurses, social centers, playgrounds, school showers, kindergartens, and “Americanization” programs for immigrants. Public schools became a major agency for social control.
Unfortunately, today’s public schools are fulfilling Mann’s and Dewey’s socialist vision with a vengeance. There is hardly any area of children’s lives that school authorities don’t push to control or manipulate. Politicians and public-school apologists in many states are now pushing programs that would make kindergarten compulsory. Public schools also now spend billions of dollars for psychological counseling, school-lunch programs, parent welfare-outreach programs, special-education classes, bilingual classes, early-childhood programs, drug and sex education classes, as well as programs for millions of “at-risk” or “special-needs” children.
This government-knows-best philosophy is the deepest reason why public schools get away with educational murder and can never be fixed. Many public-school apologists believe that your children’s education must be dictated by local governments and school authorities. By implication, they believe that parents are an annoyance at best, and at worst a danger to their children’s proper education. That is why public-school true believers will never voluntarily give up control over our children. They see themselves as noble idealists who know what is best for our children. That is why these “idealists” have contempt for parent’s rights.
Teacher Licensing Benefits Teachers, Not Our Children
If teacher licensing produced competent teachers, why would public-school authorities fight so hard against merit pay? The answer seems obvious-is it possible that the public-school system produces teachers, principals, or administrators who might not “merit” their pay, and might lose their jobs under merit-pay rules?
If licensing doesn’t work, what is the alternative? The answer is, no licensing. If anyone could teach without a license, like home-schooling parents or private-school teachers, then millions of new, competent, creative teachers would flood the market. These new, unlicensed teachers would compete with one another and drive the price of education down, much as competition drives down the price of computers. They would, thankfully, also put public schools out of business, since millions of parents and free-market schools would now hire these new competent, low-cost teachers.
Without licensing laws, anyone with a special skill or knowledge could simply put an ad in the Yellow Pages or their local newspaper and advertise themselves as a tutor in English, math, biology, history, or computer skills. Retired cooks, engineers, authors, plumbers, musicians, biologists, or businessmen who love teaching could easily open a small school in their homes. If there were no license laws, these talented new teachers would not have to worry about school authorities stopping them from teaching because they didn’t have a license.
How would parents be sure they were not hiring a charlatan if there were no licensing laws? The same way they judge their doctor, accountant, or car-mechanic-by results, reputation, and by being careful consumers. Naturally, parents would make occasional mistakes in judgment because they are human. However, they would quickly become careful consumers because they would now be spending their hard-earned money for teachers. It is amazing how fast we learn to judge the work of others when we have to pay for their services. Also, if a parent does make mistakes in judging an unlicensed teacher, by watching her child’s progress she will soon catch her error. At that point, she can quickly fire the teacher or school and find a better one. Can a parent do that with her children’s public-school teacher or school?
The worst nightmare for public-school authorities is a true free market of teachers with no licensing requirements. Fierce competition by millions of new, unlicensed, competent, highly-skilled people, might put public schools out of business and threaten teachers’ tenured jobs. That is one unspoken reason why school authorities fiercely defend licensing laws — real competition terrifies them. That is also one of the best reasons to eliminate teacher licensing.
The only way to insure good teachers is to let parents decide who will teach their children, not bureaucrats. Millions of parents making individual decisions about who should teach their children, will bring forth the best teachers. Fierce competition and an education free market would raise all boats in the teaching profession. Teachers who want to succeed in their profession would have to prove to parent-customers or private-school owners that they have what it takes. They would have to prove by results that they know how to teach and motivate children to read, write, and learn.
The Absurdity of the Public School Monopoly
The notion that local governments should have almost total monopoly control over our children’s education is not only unjust and tyrannical, it is also absurd. Children need education, to be sure, but they also need food, clothing, and shelter. The same poor or irresponsible parents who public-school apologists claim will not educate their children without compulsion, might not feed, clothe, or shelter them either. Yet, we do not see local governments owning and operating supermarkets, department stores, or apartment houses. Instead, government food stamp or rent subsidy programs give temporary financial help to those parents who are too poor to provide for their children.
When it comes to education, however, instead of giving vouchers or other temporary loans or subsidies to poor families so they can pay for their children’s education, we’ve created a government-owned-and-operated monstrosity called public schools. As we noted earlier, millions of parents now pay for private pre-schools, kindergartens, and colleges for their children in a vibrant, competitive, education free-market. Most parents who can’t afford college tuition for their kids usually apply for student loans either from a bank or a government agency. Yet for 1st through 12th-grade education, suddenly government must step in, treat all parents like idiots or potential child abusers, and own and operate all the schools.
What if supermarkets were a government-controlled monopoly?
To more fully understand the absurdity of this system, imagine for a moment that well-intentioned government authorities want to make sure that every child has enough to eat, that no child gets “left behind” when it comes to food. To insure this goal, local governments across the country take control of all supermarkets and grocery stores in your town. Under this new system, bureaucrats now own and operate all food stores, and store workers become tenured civil-service employees who can’t be fired. Your local government then passes a new “food tax” to pay for these stores and employees’ salaries. This tax is added to your current real-estate tax bill. If you don’t pay this new tax, local government officials can and will foreclose on your home.
Under this new system, suppose the local Food Board forces you and your family to buy from a particular store. The store clerks know you have to shop in their store, and that they can’t be fired. As a result, they soon become indifferent to their customer’s needs. The store managers can’t be fired, so they manage the stores badly. The stores can’t go out of business because they are supported by taxes, so they give you poor service and rotten food. If you want to change stores, you have to ask permission from your local Food Board bureaucrat, who will usually refuse your request. Also, changing food stores doesn’t accomplish much because they are all the same-all owned and operated by the same government food monopoly.
If this system sounds absurd to you, if you would scream bloody murder at having to put up with such a system simply to buy food, why do you put up with such a system when it comes to your children’s’ education?
Should elected politicians be our masters or our agents?
Also, as we noted earlier, those we elect to office are our agents, not our masters. They derive their powers from our consent. They are supposed to represent our interests and follow our instructions. Politicians, bureaucrats, and school authorities therefore have as much right to dictate how we educate our children as a real estate agent has to dictate who we sell our house to and at what price.
The following passage from Isabel Paterson’s book, “The God of the Machine,” sums up the proper response to local governments and school authorities who think they have the right to dictate how you educate your child:
“The most vindictive resentment may be expected from the pedagogic profession for any suggestion that they should be dislodged from their dictatorial position; it will be expressed mainly in epithets, such as reactionary, at the mildest. Nevertheless, the question to put to any teacher moved to such indignation, is: Do you think nobody would willingly entrust his children to you or pay you for teaching them? Why do you have to extort your fees and collect your pupils by compulsion?”
Why Don’t Bad Public Schools Go Out of Business?
If a store sells inferior products or a business gives bad service, most customers will not come back and that store or business will eventually go bankrupt. If public schools sell bad education, year after year, why don’t they go bankrupt? Why don’t they go out of business?
The answer is government compulsion. In private schools, if the school does a bad job educating children, parents will soon take their child out of that school. If enough parents take their kids out of the school, that school and its owner will go bankrupt. A private school depends on the voluntary consent and tuition payments of its parent-customers to stay in business.
Unlike private schools, public schools are a government-controlled education system that stays in business through naked compulsion. Local governments pass laws that violate parents’ fundamental rights by giving school authorities near-monopoly powers over our children’s education.
Compulsory Attendance
Compulsory-attendance laws force children to go to these schools until they are 16 years old (the age varies for each state). If a parent refuses to send her child to public school (and can’t afford a private school), she can be prosecuted for child “neglect” by social-service agencies.
Local governments force parents to pay for these schools through compulsory school taxes, whether or not parents think these schools are worth the money. If a parent refuses to pay his school taxes, his friendly local government will foreclose on his home.
Unlike private schools, public schools rarely go out of business, no matter how bad they are, because they get their “customers” (our children) and their money by force (taxes). In effect, public schools are an education tyranny.
Compulsion rears its ugly head in our public schools in many other ways. In most cases, teacher-licensing laws prevent excellent but unlicensed educators or outside experts from teaching in the schools. Tenure laws make it almost impossible for school boards to fire bad teachers or principals.
Education By Force
Local governments force children to go to public schools for six to eight hours a day, five days a week for up to twelve years, even though these children might hate public school. School authorities force children to study subjects that school authorities dictate, even though children might find these subjects boring or meaningless. Public schools also force parents to accept teachers that parents might not like or think are competent.
Many public schools force children to learn math and reading with teaching methods that can cripple children’s math and reading abilities, such as “whole-language” reading instruction (called “balanced literacy” or “language arts” today), or “fuzzy” or “new” math. If and when parents complain about these teaching methods, public schools can and often do ignore parent’s complaints.
Public schools often subject innocent young children to shocking sex-education classes that parents detest or object to. Many public schools now allow special-interest groups to push their agenda on innocent children, such as homosexual, feminist, multiculturalist, or environmental (the sky is falling) groups, with or without parent’s consent.
Teacher unions have pushed the idea of making kindergarten compulsory. It seems that public-school advocates want to get their hands on our children when they are only three years old, snatched from the arms of mothers who might not like that idea. The list goes on and on.
Bad public schools don’t shut down, and the entire system is beyond repair, because this system rests on a foundation of naked government force. Take away compulsory-attendance laws and compulsory school taxes and it’s highly likely that most public schools would “go out of business” because parents would take their business elsewhere.
Educational Options — Alternatives to Public Schools
But parents don’t have to wait for the highly unlikely event of public schools going out of business in their lifetime. Luckily, parents in America, unlike those in Germany or many other countries, still have the right to homeschool their children. Parents can also take advantage of new education options available to them right now, such as low-cost, K-12 Internet private schools that cost less than $950 a year tuition. I go into detail about these new education options in my book, “Public Schools, Public Menace.”
No Child Left Behind Law Won’t Do Much For Your Child
Past experience with federal education programs predicts that the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act will also fail parents whose children are doing poorly in school. The federal government has spent over $120 billion on Title 1 programs for low-income students since 1965. Yet the literacy rates for these children today are appalling, and the achievement gap between low-income children and their peers has not closed.
If the U.S. Department of Education wants to give real choice to parents, they should not be tinkering with a failed government-controlled school system that, by its very nature, strangles free choice and competition.
Americans have been blessed with a system that gives them almost unlimited choices in their daily lives for almost four hundred years-it’s called the free market. If parents could pay for their kids’ education in a totally unregulated, fiercely competitive education free market, free from government controls, parents would have all the school choice in the world. This education free market would also give their kids a superb, low-cost education.
Yet too often, government officials with their bureaucratic mentality, distrust the free market, the same free market that brings them their cars, clothes, computers, electricity, and fresh food. The No Child Left Behind Act adds yet another layer of federal regulations to the already strangling layers of local and state government regulations on education.
If Congress Really Wants To Help, They Should Get Government Out of the Education Business
If the federal government truly wants to give parents more school choice, they should be working to remove local and state controls over education, not adding to those controls with the No Child Left Behind law and other regulations. That is like trying to cure a person dying of arsenic poisoning by giving him more arsenic. Naturally, government education officials can’t understand the fact that government control of education is not the solution, it is the problem.
Over the past fifty years, federal, state, and city governments have spent hundreds of billions of dollars trying to “fix” the public schools. They have failed, time and again. For example, in July, 2005, the Congress-mandated National Assessment of Education Progress showed that high-school students’ dismal reading skills have not improved since 1999.
High-school drop-out rates in inner-city, low-income minority areas range from 30 percent to over 50 percent. High-school dropouts are far more likely to end up in prison during their lifetimes. A U.S. Bureau of Justice report estimates that approximately 47 percent of drug offenders and 75 percent of state prison inmates are high-school dropouts. Dropouts are also about three times more likely than high-school graduates to end up on welfare.
These are not just appalling statistics. These numbers represent millions of bright, eager chidren whose lives can be ruined by public schools that fail them.
Trying to repair the public-school system is futile, precisely because it is a compulsory, government-controlled monopoly. Trying to fix this system with vouchers, charter schools, or the No Child Left Behind Law is like trying to cure cancer with a band-aid.
Parents should not pin their hopes on any government-sponsored school-choice alternative. Vouchers, charter schools, and the No Child Left Behind Act are simply too little, too late. Also, powerful, entrenched special-interest groups in the public-school establishment fight school choice because they benefit from parents’ and children’s subservience to the system.
Parents should not expect the public schools in their neighborhoods to improve. If you want to give your children a decent education and a chance at life, you must take their future into your own hands, now. It is useless to hope that the public-school system has the will or ability to reform itself. It is a waste of your time, and your children’s precious time, to deal with, plead with, or complain to public-school authorities or employees who benefit by the system.
Instead, do as the citizen-slaves of communist East Berlin did when they fled to freedom in West Berlin-vote with your feet. Consider writing-off the public-school system. Consider taking your children out of these schools, permanently. You and your children remain victims of the public-school system only by your own consent. The power to withdraw your consent is a power that public-school authorities can’t stop. Withdraw your consent and refuse to be a victim any longer.
There are many other education resources that parents can use right now to give their kids a quality, low-cost education. These resources include the new Internet private schools, Internet tutors, low-cost, learn-to-read and learn-math books in libraries and bookstores, computer learning software, and home-schooling. I discuss all these great new education options in my book, “Public Schools, Public Menace.”
Parents Demand Dumbed-down Tests — An Unintended Bad Consequence of the “No Child Left Behind Act”
The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 is making the problem of cheating, low academic standards, and public schools lying to parents, even worse. Under this Act, the Department of Education now requires students to pass standardized tests. Failing schools will lose federal funding and other perks if their students consistently turn in a bad performance on these tests.
Holding schools and teachers accountable, and expecting students to demonstrate what they’ve learned, sounds like a good idea. But this Act means that badly-taught students, victims of dumbed-down texts and bad teaching methods like new math and whole-language instruction, now have to pass difficult standardized tests they are not ready for. As a result, millions of students may fail these tests, not because they are dumb, but because the schools never taught them to read properly or solve a math problem without a calculator. Millions of high school students with low reading and math skills now risk not graduating from high school until they pass these tests.
It is important that parents know the unvarnished truth about their children’s real academic abilities, but many parents are now frantic because they see their children’s failing grades on these new tests. As a result, they complain to school boards that they do not want their children taking these tests or not graduating from high school because of low test scores. To protect their children, many parents are now demanding dumbed-down tests to make sure that their kids graduate from high school and go to college.
The No Child Left Behind Act is now forcing many parents to condone schools that dumb-down their tests and standards, instead of blaming these schools for their children’s failure to learn. This is a typical unintended consequence of more government laws that try to fix problems that a government-controlled school system created in the first place.
State lawmakers in New York, Wisconsin, Massachusetts, and other states have yielded to parent pressure. They have scrapped or watered-down high-stakes graduation tests that proved too tough even for students in the so-called better schools in the suburbs.
In Wisconsin, state legislators backed off plans to require high school graduation tests because of strong opposition by parents from affluent suburbs. One parent group calling itself “Advocates for Education” argued that high-stakes testing would not be fair to children and would hurt educational quality in the schools. Critics of the graduation tests were worried that the tests would put too much pressure on the children. Suburban parents lobbied parent-teacher organizations, and state legislators eventually scrapped the graduation test before a single high-school student had taken it.
Similarly, New York and Massachusetts officials yielded to pressure by parents to set low passing grades for their new graduation tests. In Virginia and Arizona, state boards of education have backed away from graduation tests that were too tough for even the so-called better schools. Only 7 percent of schools in Virginia met new achievement standards, and 9 out of 10 sophomores in Arizona schools failed a new math test.
In New York City, school authorities estimated that over 30 percent of the city’s 11th-graders would not be eligible to graduate if the English language standard that will take effect next year was being applied today. Diane Ravitch of the Brookings Institute in Washington is a longtime analyst of New York’s public-school system She estimated that in some neighborhoods, less than 5 percent of high-school seniors would qualify to graduate under the new standards.
Parents, particularly those with younger children, should take heed. You don’t want to end up with high-school kids who may not graduate because they can’t pass the new tests. In Chapters 8, 9, and the Resource section of “Public Schools, Public Menace,” I explore how you can circumvent these serious problems by finding real education alternatives outside the public schools.
Are Public Schools Anti-Parent?
Some public schools try to turn children against their parents with scary classroom stories or lessons about child abuse. Public school authorities have increasingly decided that they are children’s first line of defense against alleged child abuse. This new attitude falls under what is now known as “protective behavior curriculum.” The assumptions behind this curriculum are that every child needs to be warned about and prepared for possible dangers of verbal, physical, and sexual abuse because allegedly every child is a potential victim, not only of strangers but of his or her own family.
Increasingly, school authorities instruct teachers to ask children questions about their parents’ behavior and actions toward them at home. The questions amount to asking kids to spy on their parents and report incidents that make them feel “uncomfortable.” Some school authorities use such tales by children to investigate or file charges of child abuse against parents who often did no more than yell at their children or spank them lightly.
In effect, to allegedly protect children, some school authorities now consider all parents as potential abusers, use children to invade parents’ privacy, or make kids afraid of their parents. Often, children are disturbed and emotionally traumatized by the insinuations school authorities put into their heads. The following incident described by Charles J. Sykes, in his book “Dumbing Down Our Kids,” illustrates this disturbing anti-parent campaign by many public schools across the country:
“I first became aware of the protective behaviors curriculum when a mother called me to tell me of an experience she had with her daughter. Her child, an elementary schoolgirl, had come home in tears. When she saw that her mother was home and waiting for her, she rushed to her in relief. I wasn’t sure you’d be here, she told her mother. Her mother reassured her that she would always be there for her. In school that day, her daughter told her, her class had discussed “bad” touching including spanking.
In the course of the discussion, children had been encouraged to share with the teachers and classmates whether they had ever been touched in that way and the girl had said that her mother had spanked her. The children were also told that people who engaged in bad touching would be taken away and put in jail. For the rest of the school day the girl was terrified that her mother who had spanked her would now be taken away and locked up for her bad touching.”
Parents, it might be wise to periodically ask your children if their teachers ask them personal questions about your family or how you discipline your children. Turning children into spies against their parents or making them afraid of their parents is not what parents pay school taxes for.
Read more information about “Public Schools, Public Menace.”
Parents’ Rights Violated By Public School Compulsory-Attendence Laws
Compulsory attendance laws are school authorities’ first assault on parental rights. These laws force almost forty-five million children to sit in often boring classes six to eight hours a day for twelve years. Compulsory attendance laws force parents to hand over their children to state employees called teachers, principals, and administrators, whose competence they must take on faith.
Compulsory attendance laws show contempt for parents’ rights because they are based on the notion that the state owns our children for twelve years, and that parents should have little say in the matter. In effect, these laws allow state officials to legally kidnap millions of children, allegedly to benefit the children by giving them an education (in the opinion of these officials). “Kidnap” may seem like a harsh word, yet wouldn’t you apply that word to someone who took your child by force against your will?
Unfortunately, most parents voluntarily send their kids to the local public school. These parents believe they are doing the right thing or have no alternative, so they might not believe that school authorities kidnap their kids. However, millions of other parents are so disgusted with public schools that they either homeschool their kids or send them to private schools.
Every year, school authorities and social service agencies harass or threaten hundreds of home-schooling parents who remove their child from public school. If parents refuse to send their child to the local public school, and do not strictly follow a state’s home-schooling regulations, school authorities can file child abuse or neglect charges against the parent. They can then call in social service agencies that threaten parents with jail or threaten to take away their children and put them in foster homes. The Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) claims to represent “approximately 365 home-schooling families a year who are wrongly charged of some form of child abuse or neglect” because they chose not to comply with compulsory attendance laws.
School authorities’ harassment of home-schoolers reveals the nasty compulsion underlying our public schools.
Joel Turtel
Read more information about “Public Schools, Public Menace.”
Parents — Your Children’s Report Card May Be Rigged
Under the “No Child Left Behind Act,” public schools whose students consistently fail standardized tests can be shut down. To protect their jobs, teachers and principals are now under intense pressure to cheat – to fudge test scores and report cards to fool parents and school administrators.
Myron Lieberman, former high-school teacher, listed some of the ways teachers can “cheat” in his book “Public Education: an Autopsy“:
1 –Poor students were excluded or discouraged from taking the tests
2 – Teachers assigned tests as homework or taught test items in class
3 – Test security was minimal or even nonexistent
5 – Unrealistic, highly improbable improvements from test to test were not audited or investigated
6 – Teachers and administrators were not punished for flagrant violations of test procedures
7 – Test results were reported in ways that exaggerated achievement levels (1)
In December 1999, a special investigation of New York City schools revealed that two principals and dozens of teachers and assistant teachers were helping students cheat on standardized math and reading tests.
Andrew J. Coulson, in his brilliant book, “Market Education: The Unknown History,” sites an example of how public schools deliberately lie to parents about their children’s academic abilities:
“Consistently greeted by A’s and B’s on their children’s report cards, the parents of Zavala Elementary School had been lulled into complacency, believing that both the school and its students were performing well. In fact, Zavala was one of the worst schools in the district, and its students ranked near the bottom on statewide standardized tests. When a new principal took over the helm and requested that the statewide scores be read out at a PTA meeting, parents were dismayed by their children’s abysmal showing, and furious with teachers and school officials for misleading them with inflated grades.” (2)
In 1990, three academics, Harold Stevenson, Chuansheng Chen, and David Uttal did a study of the attitudes and academic achievement of black, white, and hispanic children in Chicago. They found a disturbing gap between what parents thought their children were learning and the children’s actual performance. Teachers in high-poverty schools had given A’s to students for work that would have earned them C’s or D’s in affluent suburban schools. In the study, black mothers of Chicago elementary school students rated their child’s skills and abilities quite high and thought their kids were doing well in reading and math. The children thought the same thing.
Unfortunately, the researchers found that the parents’ and children’s self-evaluations of their math and reading skills were way above their actual achievement levels. There was a big gap between their optimistic self-evaluations and their dismal academic performance on independent tests. Public schools were giving these children a false idea of their academic skill levels. In other words, these children were heading towards failure and no one bothered to tell them.
Parents, it would not be wise to trust any claims by teachers or school authorities about your children’s alleged academic abilities, even in so-called “good” schools in suburban neighborhoods. To find out how your child is really doing, have an outside independent company test your child’s reading and math skills. If you find that your child’s academic skills are far below what your local public-school led you to believe, you might want to take your child out of public school and look for better education alternatives. There is a complete Resource section in “Public Schools, Public Menace” that explores many of these quality, low-cost education alternatives.
by Joel Turtel
Read more information about “Public Schools, Public Menace.”
(1) Myron Lieberman, Public Education: An Autopsy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 8283.
(2) Andrew J. Coulson, , Market Education: The Unknown History, (New Brunswick, (USA): Transaction Publishers), 1999, p. 22.
Most Parents Are Not Idiots or Negligent
Why do we need compulsory-attendance laws? Why compel parents to send their children to public schools? Wouldn’t parents naturally educate their children without compulsion? Human nature and history prove this to be the case. All over the world, parents push to educate their children, with or without public schools.
In Japan, school is compulsory only up to the equivalent of junior high school (ninth-grade level). High schools in Japan, like colleges in America, are privately owned and charge tuition. Middle-school students compete fiercely for a place in high schools even though their parents must pay to get them in. Yet most Japanese parents push their kids to apply for high school and scrape up the money for tuition, without the Japanese government’s pressuring them to do so.
In America, millions of parents voluntarily pay thousands of dollars a year in tuition to send their young children to private kindergartens, and their older children to a private college. Obviously, most parents think that educating their children is very important. So why do we need compulsory attendance laws for first through twelfth-grade education?
Compulsory-Attendance Laws Imply That Parents Are Either Idiots or Bad Parents
Compulsory-attendance laws imply that government has to force parents to educate their children. Common sense and history prove this notion false. Up to the 1850s, before we had public schools in America, the literacy rate was over 90 percent. Yet most parents taught their children to read at home. They did not need town officials to force them to educate their children. All over the world, most parents’ want to give their children a good education so they can have a secure future.
Compulsory-attendance laws also imply that some parents are too ignorant or indifferent to their children’s welfare to educate their kids. If this was not the case, then why compel parents at all? Local governments therefore believe they have to force these “bad” parents to deposit their kids in public schools, for the alleged good of the children.
In effect, local governments and public-school authorities don’t trust average parents to have the decency and common sense to educate their kids, unless public-school authorities force them to. That notion is as absurd as claiming that parents would not feed their children unless government authorities forced them to.
There is a saying that if you want to know the real purpose of a law or social system, follow the money. Who benefits the most from our public schools? Certainly not our kids. I submit that the real purpose of compulsory-attendance laws is to enforce a public-school system that benefits public-school employees.
Parents’ Complaints — Arrogant Public Schools Turn a Deaf Ear
School authorities continually claim that they want more parent cooperation and participation in their children’s education. They complain when parents don’t show up for parent-teacher conferences or push their children to do their homework. Yet this constant cry for parent cooperation is often a smoke screen pretense to make parents think they have some control over their children’s education. In most cases, parents have no such control. Teachers and principals may placate parents or ask for their cooperation, but they rarely make the important changes parents ask for.
For example, most parents want their children to learn to do basic arithmetic without using calculators as a crutch. A poll by Public Agenda found that 86 percent of parents want students to learn arithmetic by hand before they use calculators. However, the math-teaching policy for most public schools today is that all children beginning in kindergarten have access to calculators at all times to do math problems.
Most school districts make important teaching-method or curriculum decisions in secret, without parents’ knowledge or approval. A parent’s only recourse is to complain to principals or school authorities after these authorities have dictated their curriculum or teaching methods, and the parent sees the damage to their children. Unfortunately, such complaints are often futile.
Most parents don’t realize that school authorities don’t want their opinion. Too often, school authorities ignore parents’ suggestions or complaints because they truly believe they are the experts and parents are just annoying amateurs. As a result, some teachers, principals, or administrators feel insulted when parents make suggestions or complaints. Many school officials believe parents should not have any real input in their children’s education. That is one reason why school authorities hold their committee meetings in secret.
Another reason is that school authorities fear that parents will complain about certain classes and curriculum subjects. For instance, many public schools have introduced classes and books about homosexuality into elementary and high-school sex-education classes. When parents find out about these classes, they frequently complain to the school principal and local politicians. To avoid these complaints, public schools often try to keep secret from parents what they teach in these sex-ed classes.
Moreover, teachers, principals, and school authorities don’t have to listen to those amateur, irritating parents who complain that their kids can’t read. Public-school employees get tenure after a few years. That means, in effect, that it’s almost impossible to fire them, no matter how bad or even mediocre they are. If you couldn’t be fired, would you care about parent’s complaints? That’s why they don’t, and that’s why public-school teachers or principals can be arrogant or indifferent to parent’s legitimate complaints.
Parents, the solution is to stop hitting your head against the brick wall of arrogant public-school employees. Just walk around the wall and don’t look back. That is, consider taking your children out of public school and find real education choice and control in the education free-market. Consider homeschooling or some of the many quality, low-cost, K-12 Internet private schools I talk about in “Public Schools, Public Menace.”
Public Schools Can Waste 12 Years of Your Child’s Life
For over fifty years, public-school officials and politicians have tried one education fad after another. They have all failed. Children should not be turned into victims and educational guinea pigs by public-school authorities. Here’s why public schools can waste 12 years of your children’s lives and destroy their love of learning:
These schools teach children to read with the whole-language method, which cripples children’s ability to read. That is why after 12 years, millions of graduating high-school students have poor reading skills, and some students can barely read their own diplomas.
Public schools teach the “new” or fuzzy math which can cripple a child’s ability to do math and destroy their self-confidence. A child who is afraid of math won’t have the confidence to pursue a career in science, computers, or engineering, thereby cutting them off from these rewarding careers.
Because these schools cripple children’s ability to read, they must force children to read dumbed-down textbooks in English, History, and many other subjects. These textbooks are geared to the slowest learners in the class and water-down the subject matter. These dumbed-down courses therefore waste children’s time.
Most “teaching” in public-schools consists of students having to memorize facts from dumbed-down textbooks, only to regurgitate these same facts on dumbed-down tests. John Holt, in his book, “How Children Fail” points out that most students forget the facts they memorized within a few weeks after the test. So most children learn little from their classes except how to cram their heads with useless facts which they soon forget. This goes on for 12 years.
Public schools force children to study subjects they hate, can’t do, will never use in their lives, or which bore them. For example, many schools force students to study geometry and trigonometry, French or another foreign language, or world history. Children should be studying subjects they love and are good at. When they have to study subjects that bore them, the only thing children learn is to hate learning.
Ben Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Edison, and Mark Twain all went to a formal “grammar” school for less than two years. All were home-schooled by their parents or self-taught after they learned to read. Author John Gatto, in his book “Dumbing Us Down” said that most children can learn to read, write, and do basic arithmetic in only 100 hours of intense study. Yet our public schools keep children locked up for 12 years, yet can barely teach them to read.
Once children learn to read and write well within two years of intense study, they doesn’t need a public school at all. With their parents’ help and guidance, they can direct their own studies and education at home. Over two million children do this right now-it’s called homeschooling.
Public schools are a government-controlled monopoly. Bad schools don’t close down because compulsory taxes prop them up. Incompetent or mediocre teachers aren’t fired because tenure laws protect them. That’s why public schools will never improve and will always waste children’s precious time.
A study by the National Education Commissiion on Time and Learning found that middle-school and high-school children spent on average only about 50 percent of their school day on core “academic” subjects. The rest of their time is spent on classes about sex-education, personal safety, family life, consumer affairs, AIDS and drug prevention, save-the-environment, multiculturalism studies, “cooperative-learning” projects, study halls, electives, homeroom, counseling, sports activities, or pep rallies (high school).
If parents value their children’s time, passion for learning, and future success in life, then they should consider taking their children out of public school, permanently.
The Free Ride In Public Schools
To protect children’s self-esteem or deflect complaints by parents, many public schools today automatically advance failing students to the next grade level. In other schools, some students are left back a maximum of one year, then promoted again regardless of their academic skills.
The No Child Left Behind Act tries to solve this problem. The federal government is pressuring public schools to set minimum standards that each student must pass before advancing to the next grade.
However, in spite of these new laws, many states still have semi-automatic advancement based on the student’s overall per-formance. Many schools consider a student’s “portfolio” of work, attendance record, or other mitigating factors. Based on these factors, the school may advance students to the next grade, even though they do poorly on their tests or read at a previous grade level.
For example, a dedicated California 7th-grade math teacher wrote to Dr. Laura Schlessinger, radio talk-show host, about this problem. She said that about 30 percent of her students did not do their daily homework assignments, but she could do nothing about this. That is because the California Education code forbids teachers from “punishing” students for failing to do their homework.
She also said that students are “not retained” if they fail one class or fail all their classes. “Not retained” is a polite way of saying not left back.
Students may not want to do their homework because it bores them to death, but these kids are smart anyhow. Why should they bother doing homework or studying hard if they advance to the next grade no matter how bad they do in class? That would be dumb, and these kids are not dumb.
When students who should be failing automatically advance to the next grade from elementary school through high school, the problem keeps getting worse. By graduation day, some students who graduate can barely read their own diplomas. In effect, these students get a counterfeit diploma that is nothing more than a twelve-year attendance record.
What does automatic promotion teach children? Many students tend to set their standards no higher than what their teachers or school expects of them. Automatic promotion lets students coast along with little or no effort, knowing they will advance to the next grade even if they never study or do their homework, or receive low grades on their tests. Automatic promotion also tells kids they can succeed in life without effort or perseverance.
Besides creating millions of graduating illiterates, automatic promotion tells kids that mediocrity and laziness are acceptable. It tragically sets children up to fail later in life when reality smacks them in the face — when they apply for college or a job. These are not lessons that schools should be teaching our children.
Parents can avoid this problem by taking their children out of public school and taking advantage of the great education options Joel Turtel describes in his book, “Public Schools, Public Menace.”
Drugs and Violence In Public Schools
Public schools not only fail to educate our children, they can also be dangerous places. These schools are a natural breeding ground for drugs and violence. Children are packed into classrooms with twenty or more other immature children or teenagers, all the same age. Here, peer pressure becomes socialization, pushing many children into using drugs and alcohol.
Put twenty teenagers in the same room, or hundreds of teenagers in the same school, and you have a breeding ground for violence. Young boys and girls have raging hormones and budding sexuality, and male teenage testosterone levels are high. Teenagers are in the half-child, half-adult stage of life and often lack judgment and are emotionally immature. Pack these teenagers together into cramped little classrooms, six to eight hours a day, and you have a mixture that can lead to trouble. It’s inevitable that violence will break out-it’s built into the system.
Also, even the most conscientious teacher is usually too busy and overworked to give children the individual attention they need. Critics of home-schooling often say that home-schoolers don’t get proper socialization, an argument I will answer in a later chapter. But so-called socialization in public schools is often cruel and violent. Bullying, peer pressure, racial cliques, sexual tensions, and competition for the teacher’s approval all create a stressful, sometimes violent environment.
Compulsory attendance laws also contribute to violence in the schools. In most states, these laws force children to stay in school until they are sixteen years old or graduate high school. Teenagers who hate school, or are aggressive or potentially violent sociopaths, can’t leave. As a result, they often take out their hatred and aggression on other students. Those children want to learn are forced to endure bullying and violence by these troubled teens.
Also, the law is on the side of violent or disruptive students who are classified as “disabled.” In 1975, Congress passed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). Based on this legislation, in 1988 the Supreme Court ruled that schools could not remove disruptive disabled children from classrooms without a parent’s consent. If parents don’t consent, teachers are out of luck. Those ‘disabled’ children who are socially impaired, can’t get along with other kids, or sometimes turn violent, therefore fall under this category. Of course, this adds yet another layer of potentially violent children who teachers can’t remove from class.
Violence in public schools can literally kill your child. In the 2000-2001 school year, students were victims of about 1.9 million nonfatal violent crimes such as rape, assault, and robbery. This figure equals about 9,000 violent incidents every school day throughout America, or about one every three seconds.
Public schools are also a drug pusher’s heaven. Thousands of teenagers, pushed by intense peer-pressure, smoke, drink beer, and try marijuana or hard drugs. Schools put hundreds of children together in one big building or courtyard. Mix in overworked or indifferent teachers who have little time or desire to supervise extracurricular activities. That’s why drug pushers circle schoolyards like vultures. Where else can they find groups of vulnerable victims all herded together for their convenience? Is it any wonder that drug and alcohol use is a major problem in public schools?
In the 2001-2002 school year, 34.9 percent of tenth-grade students surveyed said they had smoked cigarettes within the past year. Fifty-one and two tenths percent said they had drunk beer, and 33.4 percent said they got bombed on that beer. Also, 29.8 percent of the same tenth-grade students said they had smoked marijuana within the past year, and 78.7 percent of these marijuana users said they got “bombed or very high” on it.
When children are home-schooled, parents can advise and watch over their kids. At home, there is no peer pressure to try drugs, as there is in public schools. Drug pushers don’t hover around private residences. Parents should therefore ask themselves: Do my children belong in violent, drug-infested public schools? Are there other education options for my children? In “Public Schools, Public Menace,” I discuss many quality, low-cost education options parents can use right now if they decide to take their children out of public school.
How Public Schools Betray Our Children
Under the “No Child Left Behind Act,” public schools whose students consistently fail standardized tests can be shut down. To protect their jobs, teachers and principals are now under intense pressure to cheat – to fudge test scores and report cards to fool parents and school administrators. Myron Lieberman, former high-school teacher, listed some of the ways teachers can “cheat” in his book “Public Education: an Autopsy”:
* Poor students were excluded or discouraged from taking the tests.
* Teachers assigned tests as homework or taught test items in class.
* Test security was minimal or even nonexistent.
* Students were allowed more time than prescribed by test regulations.
* Unrealistic, highly improbable improvements from test to test were not audited or investigated.
* Teachers and administrators were not punished for flagrant violations of test procedures.
* Test results were reported in ways that exaggerated achievement levels. In December 1999, a special investigation of New York City schools revealed that two principals and dozens of teachers and assistant teachers were helping students cheat on standardized math and reading tests.
Andrew J. Coulson, in his brilliant book, Market Education: The Unknown History, sites an example of how public schools deliberately lie to parents about their children’s academic abilities:
“Consistently greeted by A’s and B’s on their children’s report cards, the parents of Zavala Elementary School had been lulled into complacency, believing that both the school and its students were performing well. In fact, Zavala was one of the worst schools in the district, and its students ranked near the bottom on statewide standardized tests. When a new principal took over the helm and requested that the statewide scores be read out at a PTA meeting, parents were dismayed by their children’s abysmal showing, and furious with teachers and school officials for misleading them with inflated grades.”
In 1990, three academics, Harold Stevenson, Chuansheng Chen, and David Uttal did a study of the attitudes and academic achievement of black, white, and hispanic children in Chicago. They found a disturbing gap between what parents thought their children were learning and the children’s actual performance. Teachers in high-poverty schools had given A’s to students for work that would have earned them C’s or D’s in affluent suburban schools.
In the study, black mothers of Chicago elementary school students rated their child’s skills and abilities quite high and thought their kids were doing well in reading and math. The children thought the same thing. Unfortunately, the researchers found that the parents’ and children’s self-evaluations of their math and reading skills were way above their actual achievement levels. There was a big gap between their optimistic self-evaluations and their dismal academic performance on independent tests. Public schools were giving these children a false idea of their academic skill levels. In other words, these children were heading towards failure and no one bothered to tell them.
Parents would not be wise to trust any claims by teachers or school authorities about their children’s alleged academic abilities, even in so-called “good” schools in suburban neighborhoods. Parents should have an outside independent company test their child’s reading and math skills to find out how their child is really doing.
If parents find that their child’s academic skills are far below what their local public school led them to believe, they might want to take their child out of public school and look for better education alternatives. The Resources section in the author’s book shows parents many excellent, low-cost education options for their kids.
Public Schools — Bad Education Year after Year?
If a store sells inferior products or a business gives bad service, most customers will not come back and that store or business will eventually go bankrupt. If public schools sell bad education, year after year, why don’t they go bankrupt? Why aren’t they shut down?
The answer is government compulsion. In private schools, if the school does a bad job educating children, parents will soon take their child out of that school. If enough parents take their kids out of the school, that school will go bankrupt. A private school depends on the voluntary consent and tuition payments of its parent-customers to stay in business.
Unlike private schools, public schools are a government-controlled education system that stays in business through naked compulsion. Local governments pass laws that give school authorities near-monopoly powers over our children’s education. Compulsory-attendance laws force children to go to these schools. School taxes force parents to pay for these schools. Unlike private schools, public schools rarely go out of business, no matter how bad they are, because they get their “customers” and their money by force.
Compulsion Props Up the Entire Public School System
Compulsion rears its ugly head in our public schools in many other ways. State teacher licensing laws prevent excellent but unlicensed educators or outside experts from teaching in the schools. Tenure laws make it almost impossible for school boards to fire incompetent or even mediocre teachers or principals.
Local governments force children to go to public schools for six to eight hours a day, five days a week for up to twelve years, even though these children might hate public school. School authorities force children to study subjects that school authorities dictate, even though children might find these subjects boring or meaningless. Public schools also force parents to accept teachers that parents might not like or think are competent.
Many public schools force children to learn math and reading with teaching methods that can cripple children’s math and reading abilities. Public schools often subject children to values or sex-education classes that parents object to. The list goes on and on.
Like tax-supported prisons, public schools don’t shut down because the whole system rests on a foundation of naked force. Take away compulsory-attendance laws and compulsory school taxes and it’s highly likely that most public schools would “go out of business.”
But parents don’t have to wait for the highly unlikely event of public schools going out of business in their lifetime. Luckily, parents in America, unlike those in Germany or many other countries, have the right to homeschool their children. Parents can also take advantage of new, low-cost education options available to them right now, such as low-cost Internet private schools. I go into detail about these new education options in my book, “Public Schools, Public Menace.”
Are Public Schools a Menace To Your Children? — 11 Danger Signals
Here are 11 danger signals from your children that parents should watch out for:
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Is your child’s writing and spelling atrocious, yet the teacher gives your child high grades or compliments for “creative” spelling?
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Is your child constantly bored or frustrated with school and homework? |
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Does your child have difficulty doing simple arithmetic problems that he should be able to handle at that grade level? |
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Does your child come home afraid or disturbed by what she learned in school that day? |
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Does your child tell you that his teacher said bad things about you in class because you spanked or yelled at him at home? |
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Did the teacher tell your child not to tell you about something he or she learned in school that day? |
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Is your child embarrassed by what she learned in sex education class and doesn’t want to talk to you about it? |
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Does your child come home with bruises he got from some bully whom the teacher did not control? |
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Ask your child how many hours a day he or she learns reading, math, and other academic subjects, versus other classes about pagan religions, homosexuality, and other social-psychological conditioning classes. |
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Ask your child about the stories she reads in class or the exercises the teachers have her do. Is the school indoctrinating your child with values or ideas that you think are harmful or dangerous? |
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Ask to see your child’s textbooks. Are they dumbed-down and do they teach values you don’t approve of? |
If your child exhibits any of these danger signals, it may be time to seriously consider taking your child out of public school and looking for better education alternatives. “Public Schools, Public Menace” has a whole Resource Section devoted to these great education alternatives.
Parents — Do You Want Dumb, Non-Reading Children? Keep Them In Public School
To teach children how to play the piano, you first have to teach them the basics of music — keys, notes, chords, melody, and harmony. With these tools learned, your kids can experience the joy and sense of accomplishment from playing their favorite songs on the piano.
To most of us, driving a car seems effortlessness. Our eyes, hands, and feet work together seamlessly, automatically, without conscious thought. But we first had to learn the basics of driving when we were young. Remember back to your father’s driving lessons? He taught you how to turn the steering wheel, where the gas and brake pedal was, how to stay in your lane, turn signals and stop signs, use of mirrors, keeping to speed limits, looking ahead. All these basics took time and practice to learn. Now, those of us who have been driving for many years, take these basics for granted. We drive “automatically” and with skill.
The same process applies to another skill—reading. Read a book or a newspaper and it seems effortless. Yet such skill comes from constant use, from constant practice of basic skills learned at an early age.
What are these skills? To read, you have to recognize words on a printed page, yet there are millions of them. Enter the wonder of the alphabet and phonics. It is by recognizing letters and their sounds that a child puts letter-sounds together to form words. Since all words are built from only twenty-six letters, the huge task becomes greatly simplified. The child need not memorize the word, only sound it out, read it, and find its meaning in a dictionary.
As in driving a car, reading is difficult at first. But, once learned, the skill becomes automatic, unconscious, effortless, and we read quickly without sounding-out every letter of every word. In the end, with practice, we read effortlessly, and all the knowledge of the world is open to us. Without learning the basic skills, however, reading is not possible.
Enter educrat “experts” who think otherwise. “Don’t adults read without sounding out every letter of every word,” they ask ? “So why teach children phonics? Why put children through the boredom, drudgery, and hard work of phonics and spelling drills? How can reading be “joyful” if literature becomes drills?,” they say. “Why wound children’s self-esteem and self-expression with tests and standards and high expectations?”
“If we have children memorize whole words instead of drilling on the alphabet and letter sounds, all this pain is gone,” they chime. “Do not teach them to sound out M-O-T-H-E-R. Have them memorize what the whole word looks like—teach them word-pictures, teach them hieroglyphics, so they “recognize” the word in a book. Have the child read “Dick and Jane” learning books that repeat each word a hundred times, so the child comes to “recognize” it. Do this for each word.”
“If the child can’t grasp a new word because he cannot sound it out, teach him “pre-reading” strategies,” they expound. “These “strategies” will help him “guess” what the word is. Have him look at the title of the story. Have the child look at pictures, look for “clues,” look for “patterns” in the story that make sense. Or skip the word and come back to it. Or ask a friend who also cannot read it. Or finally, when all else fails, ask the teacher. Anything,” say the learned educrats, “except actually sounding out and reading the word.”
This, the educrats say, is the “centered,” “self-esteem-enhancing” way to teach reading. Meaning and context—not basics. Group discussions—not letters, sounds, drills, and independence.
This is your whole-language method (now called “balanced literacy” or some other deceptive name). This is the hieroglyphics of Egypt transported to your children’s classroom. This is our educrats’ pet “reading” theory, foisted on 45 million public-school children-victims across the country.
The results were inevitable—half the nation’s high-school grads cannot read a bus schedule. Businesses lose $40 billion a year for remedial reading classes for new employees fresh from high school. Thirty percent of Americans functionally illiterate. The child who is taught phonics is able to read thousands of words in a few semesters. The “whole-word” child-victim is able to “recognize” only a few hundred words. Thus we have the crash in reading skills, the dumbing-down of our kids, the millions of frustrated teens who drop out of school, turn to crime, and end up in prison because they can’t get a decent job.
Yet, in the face of such failure, such disaster for our children, the educrats turn a blind eye and a deaf ear. In the face of reality — massive denial and rationalization.
Buy why? What do they gain? There is always a reason for irrational behavior, and the educrats have many.
Educrats think phonics believers are extremist Christian Rightists or education simpletons unable to understand the “complexity” of the educrats’ so-called learning theories. Yet, let reality be the judge. The children who learn phonics read far quicker and better than the “whole-word” readers. And the “complexity” educrats proclaim is a self-serving fantasy of their making, designed to ward off competition. Educrats think they are gurus with special skills no parent can possess. Rather, they are education buffoons who don’t know how to teach phonics to your kids any longer, or don’t want to bother.
Educrats claim that phonics and rules will turn kids off to the joy of reading. Just the opposite is true — when a “whole-language” victim-child tries to read the many words he was not taught to “recognize,” he will give up in frustration. His frustration will end his reading and his ‘joy” in reading. The phonics-trained child can read any word and any book, and the joy of reading follows from his skills
This learning of basic skills need not be a struggle. What turns kids off? The insufferable boredom, the mediocrity of the educrats’ teaching methods, unchanged for 50 years.
Children learn the alphabet and letter sounds with delight at home. Sesame Street, “Hooked on Phonics,” the Internet, learning channels on cable TV, creative reading books especially made for kids by learning entrepreneurs can make learning letters and sounds a delight.
Phonics and drills are a drudge in government schools because educrats don’t have the time, skill, desire, or imagination to make them otherwise. Rather than blame themselves or their government-run system for failure, they blame everyone else. They now claim it is the child’s fault (he has attention-deficit disorder!), the parents’ fault (they don’t get “involved!”), or “society’s” fault (racism or “not enough money for the schools!”).
Educrats also say that drills and basics, tests and standards, are “unfair” to kids, cause them stress, and threaten their self-esteem. Just the opposite is true—real self-esteem comes from achievement, not from a teacher’s hot-air, feel-good compliments. Achievement needs tasks, content, ever-increasing complex skills children learn with guided effort. Joy, not stress, is the result of achievement. And what is more important than for children to learn that rewards come from effort and perseverence?
Educrats hate phonics and true reading skills because their teacher colleges don’t train them in the phonics method. Teachers who are not taught the phonics method will naturally feel inadequate to teach phonics to children. It is not the teachers’ fault. Rather, the fault lies with educrats, teacher colleges, and educational theorists who have contempt for phonics.
Phonics and drills requires a “teacher-centered” approach in the classroom. This approach requires greater effort and responsibility on teachers and schools to create lesson plans that show real progress in reading skills. The teacher-centered approach requires teachers and educrats to constantly test and evaluate both students and themselves.
The “whole-language” reading method, in contrast, is allegedly “student-centered,” meaning that kids get to sit around in circles and talk about their feelings rather than learn to actually read. With “whole-language” reading, educrats can claim there are no standards, no way to test reading skills and achievement. There are few rigorous tests, low standards, and no failing grades.
“Whole-language” reading therefore achieves the educrats’ ultimate goal—if there are no standards or objectivity, no one can blame them, no one can question them, no one can hold them accountable for their failure to teach our children to read.
The educrats don’t want to grade their students’ performance because it allegedly hurts the kids “self-esteem.” I believe this attitude is merely a projection of the educrat’s primal fears—they do not want parents judging their performance and holding them accountable for teaching their kids to read. The educrats don’t want their fragile self-esteem threatened by angry parents who expect public schools to do one simple thing—teach their kids to read.
Government schools are designed to assuage the educrats’ terror at being judged by parents, and being forced to compete in a free-market education system. Government (public) schools’ ultimate purpose is to be a full-employment program for educrats—to give them guaranteed jobs without accountability to parents. It is to placate these fearful educrats that our government schools dumb-down our children and turn them into illiterates with bleak futures.
So what can you, as a concerned parent, do to protect your child? As long as public schools are run by government and their educrats, they will never change. In my book, “Public Schools, Public Menace,” I tell parents about wonderful new education alternatives to public schools, such as accredited, low-cost internet private schools. Parents, I urge you to look into these alternatives, before your children are irreparably harmed by public-school whole-language, anti-phonics, “reading” instruction.
Test Your Child’s Reading and Math Skills
Filed under: How Public Schools Harm Kids, Test Your Child's Reading and Math Skills
Parents, have you tested your children’s REAL reading and math skills, and not simply believed the glowing report cards from public-school teachers?
Parents, shouldn’t you know for sure what your children’s true reading, writing, and math skills really are? You may think your kids are doing well in school, but maybe they get “good” grades because they pass easy, dumbed-down tests based on dumbed-down textbooks at your local public school. “Good” grades don’t necessarily mean your children are learning how to read and write. “Good” grades from public-school teachers don’t necessarily mean “good” education. Are your kids’ reading and math skills what they should be for their age and grade level? Are your children’s real reading and math skills a lot worse than what you think? You might want to test their current skill levels with an outside independent testing company, computer software, or books that have reading and math skills tests.
On this page I list links to some of these testing companies and other testing resources. Investigate what they have to offer you and your children. Getting your children’s real skills tested may open your eyes to the possibility that your child is getting a third-rate education, and that your local public school isn’t as good as you thought it was. Getting your children’s skills tested might be the first and most important step to giving your kids the great education they deserve.
- E-Reference Desk
- Sylvan Learning/Reading Assessment
- Test 4 Free
- Brain Child
- Educational Advisor
- Child Development Institute
- Reading Success Lab
- SEDL Reading Assessment
Improving Your Young Child’s Reading Skills – FamilyEducation.com
Take our FREE Assessment Test – Find If Your Child Is Performing At His …
Your Child, Standardized Tests and the NO Child Left Behind Act(NCLB).
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