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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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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“Were the colonists geniuses? [i.e., why did our colonial forefathers have literacy rates close to 90 percent?]. No, the truth is that reading, writing, and arithmetic only take about 100 hours [italics added] to transmit as long as the audience is eager and willing to learn. . . . Millions of people teach themselves these things. It really isn’t very hard. . .”

To be conservative, let’s assume that because you’re not an experienced teacher it takes you three hundred hours to teach your child these skills with the help of learn-to-read phonics workbooks and computer software. Three hundred hours, divided by the average six-hour public school day, comes out to fifty school days, which is about ten weeks or three months.

Let me emphasize this point – it could take you, or a tutor you pay, as little as three months to teach your child to read, write, and do simple arithmetic. Again, to be even more conservative, most children could learn these skills in one year if you (or a tutor) concentrated your instruction on these basics. Public schools take eight to twelve years of children’s lives, yet they turn out millions of high-school graduates who can barely read their own diploma or multiply 12 x15 without a calculator.

David Colfax and his wife Micki were public-school teachers turned ranchers who taught their four sons at home in the 1970s and 1980s, and three of their sons eventually went to Harvard. They co-authored a book titled Homeschooling For Excellence, which describes their home-schooling experience. In their book, they compared the time a child wastes in public school to the time average home-schooling parents need to teach their children the basics. Here’s what they wrote:

“The numbers are straightforward and irrefutable. The child who attends public school typically spends approximately 1100 hours a year there, but only twenty percent of these-220-are spent, as the educators say, ‘on task.’ Nearly 900 hours, or eighty percent, are squandered on what are essentially organizational matters.”

“In contrast, the homeschooled child who spends only two hours per day, seven days a week, year-round, on basics alone, logs over three times as many hours ‘on task’ in a given year than does his public school counterpart. Moreover, unlike the public school child, whose day is largely taken up by non-task activities, the homeschooled child has ample time left each day to take part in other activities – athletics, art, history, etc. . .”

So, according to the authors, if home-schooled children study for only two hours a day, year round, they will get three times more educational hours on academic basics like reading, writing, and arithmetic than public-school students get.

Not only does teaching your child the basics at home take far less time than you thought, but teaching these skills is even easier today because parents now have all the educational resources available to them that we’ve already noted. Also, bookstores like Barnes and Noble and Borders have whole sections full of books about teaching your child to read, write, and do basic math, as well as books that will interest and challenge young readers.

Once your children learn to read well, the whole world of learning opens to them. They can explore any subject that interests them, and read ever more difficult material by themselves in books or on the computer. For a small subscription fee, your children can study the entire Encyclopedia Britannica on the Internet. They can access almost every major library in the world through the Internet, including the Library of Congress. If your kids love to read and learn, the Internet provides unlimited resources.

Once your children read fluently, you can point them towards your local library or bookstore, supervise their studies, and see where their interests lie. Your job is to introduce your kids to as many different subjects and resources as possible. Have them take art classes at the local YMCA, library, or arts and crafts store. Introduce them to different kinds of music. See if they enjoy a music lesson on the piano, guitar, or drums. Give them classic novels by great authors to read.

Most home-schooling parents spend about three to four hours a day homeschooling their kids. The key point to remember is that you have many options and a vast amount of educational resource material available to help you homeschool your children and quickly teach them the basics. When you take advantage of this material, home-schooling can be fairly easy and take much less time than you think.

Joel Turtel

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

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Do you have children who do poorly in school, or are bored or frustrated with their classes or teachers? In contrast to what most public-school officials will tell you, in most cases the problem lies with the schools, not with your children. It turns out that millions of children, including yours, have good reasons to hate public school, reasons that you as a parent should not ignore.

Does your child show any of these danger signals? If so, your local public school (even in “good” neighborhoods) may be crippling your child’s ability to read, hurting their self-esteem, wasting your child’s precious time or destroying their love of learning.

Great News

Our book will tell you about many excellent private schools that charge less than $975 a year tuition. You can enroll your child in these schools, no matter where you live.

In a survey, over 60 percent of parents said they would send their children to a private school if they could afford it. Up to now, money has stopped many parents from giving their children the quality, rewarding education they deserve. Not any more. Expensive private-school tuition doesn’t have to stop you any longer.

New, low-cost Internet private schools let you give your child a quality elementary school, middle school, or high school education right now. You can choose from dozens of accredited K-12 Internet private schools that give your children academic excellence, great teachers, a wide choice of curriculum, old-fashioned American values, and safety in the classroom.

Also, you can enroll your child in any of these schools, no matter where you live, because these schools are on the Internet. Best of all, many of these quality Internet private schools cost less than $975 a year tuition!

The Resources section in “Public Schools, Public Menace” has a special list of these K-12 private schools. “Public Schools, Public Menace” will tell you about new, low-cost education alternatives for your kids, such as:

The Good News

You do not have to settle for 12 years of a mind-numbing, third-rate public-school education for your child any longer. With low-cost K-12 Internet private schools, you can now give your child a quality elementary school, middle school, or high school education right now. You now have real school choice. Our book, “Public Schools, Public Menace” shows you how.

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The book Public Schools, Public Menace is the resource that you need. If you are a parent looking for a private school and want to know about costs, location, curricula, and teacher qualifications, this is where you will find all of that–and more. You don’t have to limit yourself to brick and mortar private schools. If you include internet private schools, your options increase and costs decrease significantly.

A Quality Private School List

In the Resources section of Public Schools, Public Menace, you’ll find an extensive private school list. The focus is on affordable internet private schools–almost always less than $1,000 per year for tuition. Some internet private schools teach K-12th grade, while others focus on high school instruction. With a good private school list, you can find what you need, confident that budget and location are no object in getting the best for your kids.

Different parents have different values. Some are especially concerned with the religious orientation of a school’s curriculum–you can easily use Public Schools, Public Menace to find a Christian school if that is your top priority. If you simply don’t want your child’s time wasted with poor teachers or pointless classes he or she doesn’t need, you can also find a private school which has a curriculum that is entirely practical and which challenges and excites your child. You’ll be amazed at the difference in your child once he or she gets excited about learning!

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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.”

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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.

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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?

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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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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.

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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.”

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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.

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

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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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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.”

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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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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.”

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* 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.

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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.”

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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.

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