Here are ten reasons why parents should keep their kids in public schools:

1 – Public schools can cripple your child’s ability to read. The schools use a special reading-instruction method to do this called whole-language (or balanced literacy). But that’s a good thing. Why do kids need to read anyhow? It only gives them ambitions to go to college. Parents have to shell out tens of thousands of dollars for college tuition these days, so if your child can’t read, you end up saving a lot of money.

2 – Public schools can wreck your child’s ability to do math, with “fuzzy” math curriculums. But that’s a good thing. That way, your child will not strive to be a scientist or engineer and make a lot of money. Having a lot of money causes stress, and you don’t want your kids to be stressed in life, do you? Also, if your child grows up to be a supermarket check-out clerk, you don’t have to worry. The machine scans in all the prices and will tell your child how much change to give back to the customer.

3 – Public schools violate your God-given parental rights to choose who teaches your child and what he is taught. But hell, aren’t we swamped today with too many choices anyhow? It’s only reasonable to let education “experts” who have been trained in our finest “teacher” colleges tell us how to educate our children. After all, haven’t these education “experts” done a superb job educating our children up to now?

4 – Public schools give your child a “well-rounded” education. Your child’s day is filled with shocking sex-education classes, multiculturalism classes that spit on American values, save-the-earth environmental propaganda classes, drug-education classes that give your child all the dope about these drugs so he can choose wisely, and violence- prevention classes for those kids who get violent from being bored to death in public-school classrooms.

5 – Public schools give your children great socialization. Where else can your kids smoke a joint in the bathroom, meet roaming drug dealers in the schoolyards, be raped or assaulted by violent bullies on the prowl for victims, and join a racial clique that promotes harmony among the students? That’s a lot better than the “bad” socialization of homeschooling that “isolates” kids from this wonderful interaction with their peers.

6 – Public schools give your kids a great sex education. As parents, we don’t want to talk to our kids about embarrassing sex matters anyhow, so this takes us off the hook. Your child’s sex-education classes will teach her why homosexuality is a “normal” lifestyle and why sexual promiscuity is OK, as long as you remember to “protect” yourself. If your teenage daughter then decides to experiment and gets pregnant, that’s great also, because the welfare office will give your daughter monthly welfare checks, food stamps, rent subsidies, and free health care. What more can you ask for?

7 – Public schools will give your child free drugs. Yes, Ritalin is now the drug of choice for millions of school children. But isn’t that a good thing? Ritalin will help your son stop “fidgeting” and “pay attention” in class, even though he is bored to death. Ritalin also helps the teacher maintain discipline in the classroom. After all, if your son disrupts the class by “acting out,” the other kids can’t learn anything, right? So Ritalin is a wonderful way to mentally strap-down your child to his desk.

8 – Your child can “participate” in your school’s Teen-Screen program. These are “mental-health” screening programs that help determine if your teenager is mentally deranged. A health “expert” in your public school will ask your child questions such as, “have you been unhappy lately,” or “do you get along with your brothers and sisters?” From your bewildered child’s answers to these illuminating questions, the health “expert” will give his opinion as to whether your child might have a mental “disease.” He might then “recommend” that you take your child to a psychiatrist who might start your child on a cocktail of mind-altering drugs. But hell, having your child labeled with a mental “disease” isn’t that bad, is it? Your child will lose the confidence to go to college, and we’re back to advantage number one, where you’ll save a lot of money on college tuition.

9 — Your child can stay in school for twelve years. Well, maybe he won’t know how to read a bus schedule or his own diploma after twelve years, but twelve years go by fast, don’t they? Why teach your child to read at home with phonics so he becomes a great reader in only two years? My God, what will your child then do with all his free time once he can easily read War and Peace? He might actually come to love learning.

10 – Finally, public schools are cheap day-care centers. We all work hard these days because income, real estate, social security, and dozens of other taxes loot half our paychecks, and big-government-created inflation sharply increases the cost of everything we buy. So since we can’t save a penny, we can’t afford private day-care. That’s why we need public schools to house our kids while we make a living to pay the bills.

Parents, there are many other reasons NOT to keep your child in public school, but I hope you get the point by now.

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“We” have to give the schools more money. “We” have to pay the teachers more. “We” have to get parents more involved in their children’s public schools. “We” have to get parents more involved in their children’s homework. “We” have to find a way to close the achievement gap between white children and black or Latino kids. “We” have to demand accountability from our public schools and teachers. “We” have to end the drugs and violence in our public schools. “We” have to improve our teaching methods so our children can read their own diplomas when they graduate high school. “We” have to teach our children environmental propaganda about saving the earth and global warming. “We” have to teach kids to “respect” other people’s lifestyles with classes about homosexuality in their sex-ed classes.

And on and on it goes. Every “we” pressure group is at each other’s throats about what “we” have to do to “improve” the congenitally-incompetent public schools and our children’s education.

Do you notice the one common factor in all these disastrous problems with our children’s education in public schools? Right you are — it’s the “we” part. Americans have been brainwashed into thinking education is a collective “we” enterprise that must be run by governments that “we” elect. Since “we” are all taxpayers, and our taxes pay for the public schools, all of us “we” have the right to input our demands, desires, complaints, and suggestions about how to “fix” the system. Hence the endless bickering, fighting, backstabbing, grab for “public” tax dollars, power plays, and government-induced incompetent education.

What’s the real solution to finally giving our kids a decent education? Get rid of the “we.” Education must be made a private concern of individual parents, NOT a collective “right” of education run by a government-education monopoly called public schools. Let each parent educate their own children in their own way, paying whatever they can afford, in a quality, low-cost, fiercely competitive, private/independent school system. Each parent should be responsible for their own children’s education in this free-market, private-school system, just as each parent is responsible for feeding their children with food they buy from private grocery stores and supermarkets.

The problem with public schools is that they are “public” and run by government. The problem is that these government-run public schools exist in the first place. Government is the PROBLEM, not the solution to our children’s education. Get government out of the education business, and the problem is solved quickly and permanently.

No more “we” taxpayers demanding a say in the collective, government-run education system called public schools. Make it illegal for any local, state, or Federal government to own, operate, or collect taxes for any school system.

Put an end to the ridiculous notion that “we” all have a “right” to an education, so “we” need tax-supported government schools to enforce that “right.” There is no such thing as a “right” to an education. Education doesn’t grow free on apple trees. Schools, books, and teacher salaries all have to be paid for by someone. That’s what tuition is all about in a private school — to pay for these expenses. To claim that your child has a “right” to an education, is to claim that you have the right to steal from your neighbor to pay for your child’s education, through school taxes imposed by your local government.

Ask yourself this. Do you have the right to put a gun to your neighbor’s head and demand money from him to pay for your child’s sneakers or Wheaties cereal? Do you have the right to steal money from your neighbor to pay for ANYTHING your child needs? If you have some moral sense and answered no, then you also don’t have the right to steal from your neighbor for your child’s education either, no matter how much you love your child, because it’s wrong to steal, and two wrongs don’t make a right.

Yet a public “we” school system requires that “we” all steal from each other to pay for our children’s education, courtesy of compulsory school taxes. But what about single people, married couples with no children, parents with children in private schools, homeschooling parents, and older-retired people with no children in school? All these people, your neighbors, have no need for public schools because they have no school-age children in public schools. Why do your neighbors with no school-age children have to pay school taxes so that your children go to public school?  What if they passed a law saying you have to pay taxes for public golf courses, yet you hate golf and would never set foot on a golf course?

Public schools need compulsory taxes to stay alive. These taxes let some parents with school-age children steal money from their neighbors who might not have school-age children. The “we” of the public-school system therefore requires massive collective looting on a grand scale, turning us into a nation of education thieves.

So how do we end this moral nightmare that creates congenitally incompetent government (public) schools? Put an end to the “we.” Get government out of the education business. Turn education over to parents and the life-giving fresh breath of a fiercely competitive free-market education system, where each parent has complete control ONLY over their own child’s education. Then this free-market of education will sharply raise the quality of our children’s education, and sharply lower the cost of this education for average parents. The best of both education worlds without having to pay a single dollar in school taxes. Wouldn’t that be great?

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SCENE:  Melbourne, Australia:

“Sir, what are we to do about all this crime?,” asked Captain John Downey, Melbourne’s Chief of Police, to the Australian Minister of Security, Percy Sumner.

Captain Downey, tall, forty years old, square shoulders, close-cropped hair, and brown eyes, was speaking to the Minister in his huge office overlooking Melbourne Harbor in Australia. Minister Sumner was fifty years old, a short, heavy-set man, with a red, round face, brown hair, round eyes, and a small mouth.

One wall of the office had a huge map of Melbourne, with yellow, red, and blue pins stuck on the locations of recent crimes. The yellow was for burglary, red for rape, blue for murder. Alongside this map was a chart showing crime rates for each of the three crime categories. The chart showed a definite pattern — crime rates had been increasing in Melbourne over the last five years.

Downey said, “I don’t know what to do anymore, sir. No matter how many police we put on the streets, no matter how much we increase prison sentences, the crime rates keep going up. I don’t understand it, sir. I don’t know how to stop it.”

Minister Sumner tightened his little mouth. He said, “It’s all those guns out there on the streets, Captain Downey, that’s the problem. We’ve forced every gun owner in Melbourne to register every gun and rifle they own. We’ve planted our agents at gun shows. We’ve started suing the gun manufacturers. It’s those damn guns. If so many Aussies didn’t own guns, the crime rate would fall. I’ve been discussing this issue seriously with the Prime Minister, Captain. We have agreed that the only solution is gun confiscation. Confiscate every gun in Melbourne and the crime will stop. No guns, no crime, right Downey? That sounds like common sense, doesn’t it?”

“Yes sir,” Captain Downey said eagerly, “that’s what I’ve been suggesting to you for the last year. Another reason we want to confiscate the guns is because when we make drug raids without warrants, sometimes our men get shot as intruders. Some home owners actually have the gall to try to defend their homes against our boys, who are just doing their duty. I don’t want any home owner with a gun in his house. We should also make it a crime for a home owner to use a gun to defend himself in his home against a burglar. If we let him have that right, you never know when he might use that same gun against one of our men who break down his door on a drug raid.”

“The same goes for the women. We can’t allow them to carry a gun, either in their home or on the streets. If they think a mugger is threatening them or might rape them, they should contact the police. We’ll be there within an hour. What if the woman owned a gun and didn’t know how to use it? You know how stupid women are with guns, Minister. We can’t trust them with a gun. And women are so careless, they’ll leave the gun lying around the house where children can find them. It’s worth confiscating everyone’s guns, just so one child doesn’t die from a gun accident.”

Minister Sumner nodded his round head vigorously in agreement. He said, “Good ideas, Downey, I’ll suggest them to the Prime Minister. I think we’ll be able to get the confiscation laws passed in about a month. Thank you for your time, sir. I’ll talk to you again in about four months. By that time, our wall charts should start showing a big decrease in crime. Good day, sir.”

“Good day, Minister. Thank you for your help in this matter. We’ll put a dent in the crime, wait and see.” With that, Captain Downey confidently walked out of the Minister’s office.

FOUR MONTHS LATER:

In the same office. Outside the window, the late afternoon sky was dark and cloudy, and the two men were having another heated conversation.

“Look at the charts, Captain Downey. By God, look at them!,” said Minister Sumner. “The graphs are going straight up, there going off the wall! What in blazes is going on? Our crime rate is triple what it was four months ago. Didn’t you confiscate all the guns in Melbourne, Captain? What the hell is going on?”

“Yes, sir, we did confiscate all the guns,” replied Captain Downey, pacing nervously in front of the Minister’s desk. “I just don’t understand it. We put out the confiscation order the day after we spoke at our last meeting. It was in all the newspapers. We think most law-abiding Melbourne citizens complied. Our local police stations report that over thirty thousand registered guns were handed in.”

“Thirty thousand, did you say?,” asked the Minister. “I thought our gun-registration rolls showed ninety thousand register guns in Melbourne. Why only thirty thousand handed in? What is going on? Didn’t you indicate on your confiscation orders and newspapers ads that anyone not handing in their guns would be subject to prosecution and five years in prison?”

“Yes we did, sir,” stammered Captain Downey. “But all of a sudden, every owner we contacted said they had lost their gun, so couldn’t hand it in. What are we going to do sir, get search warrants to search the homes of sixty thousand gun owners? If they’re hiding their guns, we probably won’t even find them.”

“Not only that, sir, as usual the criminals are not paying attention to our confiscation laws. They get their guns illegally, like they always have. We’ve caught a few house burglars and interrogated them, sir. They have been going on a rampage. They used to hit a few houses a week. Now they are hitting a dozen a week, sir. We were puzzled.

We asked them why? They just looked at our interrogators with contempt, like our men were idiots. What do you think they said, sir?”

“What?,” asked Minister Sumner?

“They thanked me, sir.”

“Thanked you, Captain? What the devil do you mean? Why did they thank you?”

“Because, sir, they thanked me for the new gun confiscation laws, and the laws forbidding home-owners from owning or using a gun for self-defense. They thanked me for making their job so much easier and safer. They said they now just knock on the mark’s door, pretend to be the gas man, barge into the house with their guns drawn, and loot the house. They said they’re not afraid of getting shot anymore by the home owner. Some of them had the effrontery to tell me to thank you personally, sir,” Captain Downey said with outrage.

“They did, did they?,” Minister Sumner said, getting red in the face. “We’ll see about that. I’m going to suggest to the Prime Minister some new gun-control laws. I want him to give us the power to make random searches without warrants in every house and apartment in Melbourne. I want him to increase the prison terms for gun possession to thirty years without chance of parole. I want him to forbid all gun clubs and guns shows — that’s probably where the burglars and murderers get their guns.

I’ll also ask him for the power to confiscate anyone’s car, home, or bank account who is caught with a gun. That will solve the problem, by God.”

“But sir,” Captain Downey protested meekly, “we’re already getting hundreds of complaints about the increasing, heavy-handed tactics of our gun squads. There’s been some nasty newspaper articles mentioning our Constitution, ‘rights of the people,’ and all that crap.”

“The hell with that,” Captain. “What do we care about so-called ‘rights?’ We have a crime spree. It’s an emergency. Our efforts must not be thwarted by silly notions about rights and Constitutions. Guns are killing people every day. That’s all that matters.”

Captain Downey said, “Yes, sir. I hope you’re right. I surely do. I am just a little afraid of civil unrest, sir, that’s all.”

“To hell with civil unrest, Captain, said Minister Sumner. “That’s what our riot police and prisons are for. We know best how to solve this problem, and we won’t let a bunch of agitators stop us. I will ask the Prime Minister to put my new suggestions into place immediately. You’ll see quick results.”

“Yes, sir. I hope you’re right, sir. Please let me know when the new laws are in place, sir, so my men can start enforcing them.”

“Very good, Captain. I will do so. I will then meet with you in another four months. Good day, Captain.”

“Good day, Minister.”

Of course, four months later, in that same office, the charts where now going ballistic. Crime rates were soaring. Australia had gained the international distinction of having the second highest crime rate in the world (after England, who also has strict gun control and confiscation laws).

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Home-schooling removes children from public school. That alone makes home-schooling worthwhile. Unlike public-school children, home-schooled kids are not prisoners of a system that can wreck their self-esteem, ability to read, and love of learning.

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It may seem obvious to many people why literacy is so important in our technologically advanced society. However, many parents may not fully realize the emotional pain and life-long damage illiteracy can cause their children. Literacy, the ability to read well, is the foundation of children’s education. If children can’t read well, every subject they try to learn will frustrate them. If they can’t read math, history, or science textbooks, if they stumble over the words, they will soon give up reading out of frustration. Asking children who are poor readers to study these subjects is like asking them to climb a rope with one arm.

Kids learn to read in their most formative years, which is why reading can profoundly affect their self-esteem. When children learn to read, they also start learning how to think abstractly, because words convey ideas and relationships between ideas. How well they read therefore affects children’s feelings about their ability to learn. This in turn affects how kids feel about themselves generally whether a child thinks he or she is stupid or bright. Children who struggle with reading often blame themselves and feel ashamed of themselves.

As Donald L. Nathanson, M.D., Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at Jefferson Medical College noted: First reading itself, and then the whole education process, becomes so imbued with, stuffed with, amplified, magnified by shame that children can develop an aversion to everything that is education.

Often, poor readers will struggle just to graduate from high school. They can lose general confidence in themselves, and therefore the confidence to try for college or pursue a career. Their job opportunities can dry up. Their poor reading skills and low self-confidence can strangle their ability to earn money. They can struggle financially their whole lives. If they marry and have children, they can struggle even more.

Life for illiterate adults can easily degenerate into misery, poverty, failure, and hopelessness. According to a 1992 study by the National Institute for Literacy, “43 % of Americans with the lowest literacy skills live in poverty and 70 % have no job or a part-time job. Only 5% of Americans with strong literacy skills live in poverty.” As Dr. Grover Whitehurst, Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of Education, said, “Reading is absolutely fundamental. It’s almost trite to say that. But in our society, the inability to be fluent consigns children to failure in school and consigns adults to the lowest strata of job and life opportunities.”

By the 1850s, before we had compulsory, government-controlled public schools, child and adult literacy rates averaged over 90 percent, making illiteracy rates less than 10 percent. 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. What is literacy like in our public schools today?

In 1995, a student teacher for a fifth-grade class in Minneapolis wrote the following letter to the local newspaper: . . . I was told [that] children are not to be expected to spell the following words correctly: back, big, call, came, can, day, did, dog, down, get, good, if, in, is, it, have, he, home, like, little, man, morning, mother, my, night, off, out, over, people, play, ran, said, saw, she, some, soon, their, them, there, time, two, too, up, us, very, water, we, went, where, when, will, would, etc. Is this nuts?

In 2002, the New York State Education Department’s annual report on the latest reading and math scores for public school students found:

· 90 percent of middle schools failed to meet New York State minimum standards for math and English exam scores.

· 65 percent of elementary schools flunked the minimum standards.

· 84 percent of high schools failed to meet the minimum state standards.

· More than half of New York City’s black and hispanic elementary school students failed the state’s English and math exams. About 30 percent of white and asian-american students failed to achieve the minimum English test scores.

· The results for eighth grade students were even worse. Here, 75 percent of black and hispanic students flunked both the English and the math tests. About 50 percent of white and Asian-American eighth graders failed the tests. These illiteracy rates are now common in public schools across America, not just in New York City.

In short,as shown by the New York State Education Department’s annual report and other studies, student illiteracy rates in many public schools range from 30 to 75 percent. This is an education horror story.

That is what illiteracy can mean, what it does mean for millions of public-school children who can barely read. Does any parent want this kind of future for his or her children? I argue in Public Schools, Public Menace that our public school system is the primary cause of this tragic illiteracy, and one reason why these schools are a menace to our children.

A great movie to see that shows the tragic consequences of illiteracy is “Stanley and Iris” with Robert DeNiro and Jane Fonda. After you see this movie, you might think twice about keeping your children in public school. There are wonderful, new, low-cost private schools that are alternatives to public school, that parents can take advantage of right now.

Read more information about “Public Schools, Public Menace.”

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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 educational 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.

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Many studies confirm that home-schooled kids learn more, learn better, and learn faster than public-school children. Christopher J. Klicka, author of “The Right Choice: Homeschooling,” cites a nationwide study of more than 2,163 home-schooling families conducted in 1990 by the National Home Education Research Institute: “The study found the average scores of the home school students were at or above the 80th percentile in all categories.” This means that the homeschoolers scored, on the average, higher than 80 percent of the students in the nation. The home schooler’s national percentile mean was 84 for reading, 80 for language, 81 for math, 84 for science, and 83 for social studies.

Several state departments of education also conducted their own surveys on the academic achievement of home-schooled students. In 1987, much to its embarrassment, “the Tennessee Department of Education found that home-schooled children in second grade, on the average, scored in the 93rd percentile, while their public school counterparts, on the average, scored in the 52nd percentile on the Stanford Achievement Test.” (The SAT-9 is a well-respected battery of multiple-choice academic achievement tests for public-school students) These studies, and many others, confirm the fact that home-schooling parents can give their kids a superior education. This shouldn’t surprise us. Home-schooling parents succeed where public schools fail because parents give loving, personalized attention to their children, use innovative free-market educational materials, and nourish a love of learning in their kids.

By Joel Turtel

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Home-schooling is a great success. That’s why many public-school authorities hate home-schooling parents.

Home-schoolers are a direct challenge to the public-school monopoly. This monopoly makes it almost impossible to fire tenured public-school teachers or principals. As a result, tenure gives most teachers life-time guaranteed jobs. They get this incredible benefit only because public schools have a lock on our children’s education.

If public-school employees had to work for private schools and compete for their jobs in the real world, they would lose their security-blanket tenure. That’s why school authorities view home-schooling parents who challenge their monopoly as a serious threat.

Many school officials also can’t stand the fact that average parents who never went to college give their kids a better education than so-called public-school experts. Successful home-schooling parents therefore humiliate the failed public schools by comparison.

Home-schooling parents also humiliate school authorities who claim that only certified or licensed teachers are qualified to teach children. Most home-schooling parents thankfully never stepped foot inside a so-called teacher college or university department of education. Yet these parents give their children a superior education compared to public-school educated kids.

Also, many public-school officials resent home-schoolers because the typical public school loses about $7500 a year in tax money for each child that leaves the system. Tax money is the life blood of the public-school system. Tax money pays for public-school employees’ generous salaries, benefits, and pensions. Is it any wonder why school authorities don’t want to lose their gravy train?

For these reasons, until fairly recently, most state legislatures either outlawed homeschooling or tried to strangle it to death with regulations. In 1980, only Utah, Ohio, and Nevada officially recognized parents’ rights to homeschool their children. In most other states, legislators continually harassed or prosecuted home-schoolers under criminal truancy laws and educational neglect charges.

By 2004, however, pressure from parents, Christian home-schooling organizations, and recent court rulings pushed all fifty states to enact statutes that allow home-schooling, as long as certain requirements are met. These requirements vary for each state.

In spite of these statutes, many states and school authorities still harass home-schooling parents. That is because the Supreme Court slapped parents in the face when they gave local governments the right to regulate home-schooling. As a result, many home-schooling parents are still harassed by local school officials.

If you are a homeschooling parent, you must know how to protect your legal rights. To do this, you should seriously consider joining the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA). Founded in 1983, HSDLA provides its members with legal representation against local school officials who might harass you, demand to supervise your home-schooling, or demand to periodically test your home-schooled children. You can join at their web site, http://www.hslda.org.

The Rutherford Institute is another well-known organization dedicated to protecting parents’ rights and providing legal help to home-schooling parents. Their website is http://www.rutherford.org.

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The fact is, if you don’t like the drugs, violence, anti-Christian values, and overall poor quality of education available in most public schools, you can now afford private schooling. The rise in popularity and viability of internet private schools means that a private school can cost a small fraction of what you think. If you’re assuming that private school tuition is in the neighborhood of $4,000 annually for a Catholic school–or $8,000 and upward for a private boarding school–you’ll be delighted by the information you’ll find in Public Schools, Public Menace.

A New Perspective on Private School Cost

A good internet private school can cost less than $950 per year. Break that down monthly and then weekly. It’s $85 per month for the ten months of the school year, or $25 per week. A small adjustment in your grocery bill or eating out budget, and your children can get a top quality education.

In Public Schools, Public Menace you’ll find out more about the best internet private schools in the world. You’ll have the option to be involved in every aspect of your child’s education, which means that your child will have every advantage. If you have the information you need, the cost of private schooling will never again keep your child from having the education he needs and deserves.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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