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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Why have we put our children into educational prisons called public schools? What crimes have they committed? Why do we condemn almost 45 million innocent children to this punishment? Do I exaggerate by calling these schools “prisons?” Well, let’s compare prisons and public schools.

What are prisons? They are places were people are locked up against their will for crimes they have committed.

What is life like for a prisoner? The warden and prison guards, in effect, take away the prisoner’s life and freedom. They force a prisoner to live in a small cell he doesn’t want to live in, eat food he may hate, work at a job he detests, associate with other prisoners who may be dangerous, and remove him from everyone and everything he loved in the outside world when he was free.

Comparing Prisons to Public Schools

Like prisons, public schools impose their will by force, by compulsion. Local governments force parents to send their children to public schools just as the police drag convicted criminals into prison (even though many parents are not aware of this and voluntarily send their kids to these schools). A parent can be convicted of alleged child abuse and sent to prison if she disobeys the school authority’s order to send her child to the local public school.

Local governments then force parents to pay school taxes for these education prisons. If they don’t pay these taxes, their local government will foreclose on their home and throw them out on the street.

School authorities force children to stay in school until they are 16 years old or graduate high school (these age limits vary by state). In effect, most children get a 10-year education prison sentence if they start school at age six.

School authorities force millions of children to sit in boxes called classrooms with 20 other children-inmates for six to eight hours a day, five days a week, for up to ten years. The children must obey the adult education wardens (teachers and principals), who they may fear or dislike. They must study subjects they may hate or that bore them to death. They must associate only with other children their same age who may be bullies, violent, or emotionally disturbed. They must do homework and study for tests they must pass or be left back in school.

The children are removed from their loving parents and put under the control of teacher-wardens who may not love them, care for them, or simply even have the time to pay attention to them. They are stopped from being a free and free-spirited child. They are told to keep quiet. They are told to obey the rules. They are told to march from classroom cell to classroom cell every 50 minutes to study different subjects that may mean nothing to them.

Parents, if you don’t think this is harsh punishment for your innocent child, ask yourself this. When your spouse pressures you to attend some event you hate, whether a ballet, lecture, or football game, how do you feel? After sitting at that event for only an hour, how do you feel? You are probably angry, irritated, and frustrated. You squirm in your seat or doze off. You can’t wait to get out of there. You can’t wait to get back to your life and doing the things you love to do.

Well, millions of kids, and probably your child, must sit through this agony of boredom or frustration for 6 to 8 hours a day for 10 years in public-school classrooms. Yet, to repeat, what crimes have your children committed to warrant this horrible punishment?

In fact, they have committed no crime whatsoever. They are simply innocent victims of local governments and public-school authorities who think they own your children, who think they have the right to put your children into education prisons for 10 years for “their own good.”

Parents, if a rogue cop came and took your child to prison for no reason whatsoever, except for saying it would be for your child’s “own good,” would you not fight to the death to stop him? So why do you let school authorities take your innocent children and punish them for ten years?

Parents, if you thought you had no choice, you are wrong. Happily, you can homeschool your child or give your child a fun, quality, rewarding, low-cost education with Internet private schools. You have many education options. If your child hates school, listen to him or her. Don’t let school authorities put your child in a public-school prison for ten years. You have a choice, and your child’s life is at stake.

You can find out about all your education options in Joel Turtel’s book, “Public Schools, Public Menace.” Please take advantage of the Resources in this book, for your children’s sake.

Joel Turtel

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

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Many parents might think it a bit farfetched to compare our public schools to schools in socialist or communist countries. However, if we look closer, we will see striking similarities between the two systems.

In the former socialist-communist Soviet Union, for example, the government owned all property and all the schools. In America, public schools are also government property, controlled by local government officials. In Soviet Russia, the government forced all parents to send their children to government-controlled schools. In America, compulsory-attendance laws in all fifty states can force parents to send their children to public schools if the parents can’t afford a private school.

The Soviet rulers taxed all their subjects to pay for their schools. Here, all taxpayers pay compulsory school taxes to support public schools, whether or not the homeowner has children or thinks the schools are incompetent. In the Soviet Union, all teachers were government employees, and these officials controlled and managed the schools. In America, teachers, principals, administrators, and school janitors are also government employees, paid, trained, and pensioned through government taxes.

In the Soviet Union, most government employees presumed they had a ‘right’ to a job provided by the state. Public-school employees in America also believe they have an alleged right to their jobs, enforced through tenure laws. In America, it’s very difficult and costly to fire tenured teachers. In communist Russia, competence and working hard didn’t matter very much — the government paid most workers regardless of their performance on the job. In America, public-school teachers’ salaries depend on length of service and civil-service rules, not competence. In communist Russia, the elite ruling class had estates in the countryside while peasants starved. Here, public-school authorities get fat salaries, pensions, and benefits while millions of children get a dismal education.

In communist Russia, government control of food supplies created eighty years of chronic famine. In America, one hundred and fifty years of public schools has created an educational famine. Many public-school children can barely read while the system wastes years of our children’s lives.

Albert Shanker, former President of the American Federation of Teachers, Agreed

Still think the comparison to communist schools is too farfetched? Albert Shanker, late President of the American Federation of Teachers, the second largest teacher’s union, once said: “It’s time to admit that public education operates like a planned economy, a bureaucratic system in which everyone’s role is spelled out in advance and there are few incentives for innovation and productivity. It’s no surprise that our school system doesn’t improve. It more resembles the communist economy than our own market economy.”

Public School Authorities Act Like Socialist Commissars

Finally, schools in some communist countries like China seem to give a better, more disciplined education in the basics of reading, writing, and math than our public schools. International math and reading test-score comparisons often find American kids lagging far behind children from China.

But what values do Chinese communist schools teach their children? Here is another apt comparison between communist schools and our public schools. In both cases, either a central or local government controls the curriculum and the values it chooses to teach its students. The Chinese government can and does indoctrinate all school children with its communist ideology and loyalty to the communist leaders.

Similarly, in our public schools,  school authorities control the curriculum and the values they teach our children. In many public schools, values-clarification programs and distorted American history courses in many public schools now indoctrinate our children with anti-traditional American values. In both communist schools and our government-controlled public schools, it is extremely difficult for parents to stop school authorities from teaching what parents consider harmful or immoral values to their children. Question — Do socialist, compulsory, government-controlled public schools belong in America, once the land of the free?

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What are prisons? They are places where people are locked up against their will for crimes they have committed.

What is life like for a prisoner? The warden and prison guards, in effect, take away the prisoner’s life and freedom. They force a prisoner to live in a small cell he doesn’t want to live in, eat food he may hate, work at a job he detests, associate with other prisoners who may be dangerous, and remove him from everyone and everything he loved in the outside world when he was free.

Like prisons, public schools impose their will by force, by compulsion. Local governments force parents to send their children to public schools just as the police drag convicted criminals into prison (even though many parents are not aware of this and voluntarily send their kids to these schools). A parent can be convicted of alleged child abuse and sent to prison if she disobeys the school authority’s order to send her child to the local public school.

Local governments then force parents to pay school taxes for these education prisons. If they don’t pay these taxes, their local government will foreclose on their home and throw them out on the street.

School authorities force children to stay in school until they are 16 years old or graduate high school (these age limits vary by state). In effect, most children get a 10-year education prison sentence if they start school at age six.

School authorities force millions of children to sit in boxes called classrooms with 20 other children-inmates for six to eight hours a day, five days a week, for up to ten years. The children must obey the adult education wardens (teachers and principals), who they may fear or dislike. They must study subjects they may hate or that bore them to death. They must associate only with other children their same age who may be bullies, violent, or emotionally disturbed. They must do homework and study for tests they must pass or be left back in school.

The children are removed from their loving parents and put under the control of teacher-wardens who may not love them, care for them, or simply even have the time to pay attention to them. They are stopped from being free-spirited child. They are told to keep quiet. They are told to obey the rules. They are told to march from classroom cell to classroom cell every 50 minutes to study different subjects that may mean nothing to them.

Parents, if you don’t think this is harsh punishment for your innocent child, ask yourself this. When your spouse pressures you to attend some event you hate, whether a ballet, lecture, or football game, how do you feel? After sitting at that event for only an hour, how do you feel? You are probably angry, irritated, and frustrated. You squirm in your seat or doze off. You can’t wait to get out of there. You can’t wait to get back to your life and doing the things you love to do.

Well, millions of kids, and probably your child, must sit through this agony of boredom or frustration for 6 to 8 hours a day for 10 years in public-school classrooms. Yet, to repeat, what crimes have your children committed to warrant this horrible punishment?

In fact, they have committed no crime whatsoever. They are simply innocent victims of local governments and public-school authorities who think they own your children, who think they have the right to put your children into education prisons for 10 years for “their own good.”

Parents, if a rogue cop came and took your child to prison for no reason whatsoever, except for saying it would be for your child’s “own good,” would you not fight to the death to stop him? So why do you let school authorities take your innocent children and punish them for ten years?

Parents, if you thought you had no choice, you are wrong. Happily, you can homeschool your child or give your child a fun, quality, rewarding, low-cost education with Internet private schools. You have many education options. If your child hates school, listen to him or her. Don’t let school authorities put your child in a public-school prison for ten years. You have a choice, and your child’s life is at stake.

You can find out about all your education options in Joel Turtel’s book, “Public Schools, Public Menace.” Please take advantage of the Resources in this book, for your children’s sake.

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Also, while an average of 35 percent of American mothers work, so do 30 percent of mothers in Japan, 33 percent of mothers in Taipei, and 97 percent of mothers in Beijing.¹⁸ Since Japanese, Taiwanese, and Chinese children consistently outperform American children on standardized tests, these excuses don’t explain why American kids do so poorly in school.

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A few rare inner-city public schools manage to give their students a better-than-normal education. These schools prove that poverty can’t be used as an excuse for bad education. Samuel Casey Carter, researcher and Bradley Fellow of the Heritage Foundation, investigated twenty-one of these schools where low-income children received a better education than kids in other public schools:

“Under principal Irwin Kurz, the 6th grade at P.S. 161 in Brooklyn, New York, has the second highest reading scores in all of New York State.”

KIPP Academy in Houston, Texas, under Michael Feinberg, is 95 percent low-income and 90 percent Hispanic. Within one year, students who enter the middle school with passage rates of 35B50 percent on the state assessment test are passing by more than 90 percent in both math and reading.

Seventy-eight percent of the students in Bennett-Kew Elementary in Inglewood, California, are low-income. For 20 years, Nancy Ichinaga’s school has been one of the highest performers in all of Los Angeles County.²⁰

Carter found that these principals succeeded where most other public-school principals failed because they followed seven important rules in running their schools:

1) Effective principals are free to decide how to spend their money, whom to hire, and what to teach; 2) Effective principals use measurable goals to establish a culture of achievement; 3) Master teachers bring out the best in a faculty; 4) Rigorous and regular testing leads to continuous student achievement; 5) Discipline is anchored in achievement; 6) Effective principals work actively with parents to make the home a center of learning; 7) Effective principals require hard work. ²¹

Many charter and private schools use these same educational rules, which is why low-income minority kids succeed in these schools. In contrast, millions of low-income children fail in public schools because the schools don’t apply these rules.

One more example will suffice to show that poverty is no excuse for most public schools’ dismal performance. Harvard University did a two-year study of tuition-scholarship programs for minority children in New York, the District of Columbia, and Dayton, Ohio. Students were picked by lottery to receive the tuition scholarships. Minority students who transferred to a private school from a public school soon did better in their studies.

Critics of previous tuition-scholarship studies where public-school students did better in a private school had claimed that students’ performance could have improved because of other factors, such as motivation or family background. But in the Harvard study, children were randomly assigned by lottery to private or public schools. As a result, neither poverty nor parents’ motivation explained the difference in achievement.

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However, minority parents often complain just as passionately that teachers don’t treat them with respect, that they give up on their children, and are only interested in collecting their paychecks.

This excuse implies that black or hispanic parents don’t value their children’s education as much as white or asian-american parents do. Inner-city minority parents allegedly don’t monitor their children’s progress in reading and other subjects, push their children to do their homework, or meet with teachers to go over problems their kids are having in school. Without parents’ cooperation, school authorities ask, how can we educate their children?

Who is right here? Are minority parents AWOL, and if so, why? If some minority parents are AWOL from the public schools, their comments to the former teacher-union president reveal why. These parents believe that teachers and principals don’t listen to them, don’t respect them, and don’t care about their kids.

The following scenario at a typical parent-teacher conference illustrates why some parents might go AWOL. Low-income minority and other parents who attend a conference might bitterly complain to the teachers and principal that their children can’t read, and that the school is doing a lousy job teaching their kids. In turn, to defend themselves, the teachers will give these parents their list of excuses. They might explain to the allegedly uninformed parents that teachers are the experts, and that their teaching methods are based on the latest scientific research. If parents press them, they might claim that no one could do a better job than they do, considering the alleged low salary they get or the big class sizes. Or they might tell parents that their kids have been getting passing grades, so why complain. But the parents might then respond, “but my kids can’t read!”

If parents tell teachers and the principal they want the school to change its teaching methods, do you think it will? If parents insist they want their children to learn to read with the phonics method, instead of whole-language instruction, many principals will probably say it is out of the question. They will say that school authorities set the curriculum and tell him to use whole-language instruction. Parents have no choice or power in the matter. That is the message many teachers and principals will convey to them.

Many teachers don’t know how to teach phonics anymore —their so-called teacher colleges never taught them. Principals have to obey the orders of their superiors in the Board of Education who insist they use the whole-language method. If schools had to teach phonics reading, that would require complete retraining of teachers. Most school authorities with tight budgets are just not interested.

So the teachers and principal at this “friendly” parent-teacher conference often politely look down their noses at parents and tell them, in effect, to buzz off. They say or imply that they know what is best for their children’s education, and they will make no changes in how they teach their kids.

In a parent-teacher’s conference, the school’s final argument with parents is, in effect, a gun. That is, compulsory-attendance laws force minority parents to send their children to these schools, and school authorities can dictate what and how children learn. Remember that teachers and principals are tenured civil servants who are almost impossible to fire, and they know this. In response to every frustrated demand and complaint by parents, teachers and principals can simply say, “Too bad, we’re doing it our way, and you can’t do anything about it.” They may not use those exact words, but that is the underlying message.

Parents quickly learn that their complaints fall on deaf ears. If a school refuses to act on parents’ complaints or give parents some control over their children’s education, naturally minority parents feel helpless. No matter how many parent-teacher conferences they go to, parents can’t change the system in any meaningful way, and it is the system that betrays their children. Teachers and principals are just little cogs in the system’s machinery. They can’t change the system, even if they wanted to. So low-income minority and other parents see that no matter how much they complain, nothing changes. Isn’t it understandable why they might go AWOL, why they might give up? Wouldn’t you?

Here is one parent’s experience with parent-teacher meetings as described in Education Week magazine:

“Parents are welcome in the building for the traditional cookie-bake fund-raiser. But when PIE [Partners in Education], our Nyack group [Nyack, NY], organized 30 volunteers to read aloud to children, they were not welcome. The program was arranged with the principal and teachers through the shared decision-making team. But once district employees realized this meant parents would be inside — with a chance to see how the school worked — the program was nixed. I don’t believe ours is the only district with a tendency to see parents as spies. . . . Parents are welcome in the building—but not for too long.“

Another reason many parents may go AWOL is because they think public schools are free. There’s a simple law of human psychology that says, when you pay, you pay attention.   When we pay for something out of our own pockets, we become careful consumers. This applies even more to low-income families or single, working mothers. A single, working mom might work longer hours or take on a second job to pay the bills. Her hard-earned money is precious to her, so she can’t afford to waste a penny. If she pays tuition to a Catholic or Protestant-affiliated school for her child, she is far more likely to watch like a hawk how the school is teaching her children. She will constantly check how her children progress in reading and other subjects. She doesn’t have a second chance with her children’s education, because she doesn’t have much money to spare.

As a result, she will push her children to study, do their homework, and listen to the teacher. She will encourage her children and consult with their teachers. She knows her hard-earned money, and her children’s only chance at a future, will go down the drain if she does not pay attention to her children’s education.

In contrast, low-income parents who think public schools are “free” because they don’t pay school taxes, are less likely to pay attention to their children’s progress in school. That’s because of another law of human psychology—if you don’t pay for it, you don’t value it. Low-income parents who don’t own a home, don’t waste their hard-earned school taxes if their children’s public school does a lousy job. Of course, most parents will be angry with the schools because they love their children and want the best for them, but for low-income minority parents, the financial sting is gone. Low-income parents who don’t pay school taxes for public-school education might value it less, so might pay less attention to their children’s progress.

Yet another law of human psychology applies in this matter — if you don’t pay for it, you don’t think you have the right to complain. If a stranger gives you something for free, you probably won’t complain if there’s something wrong with it. If parents think public schools are free, many might think they have no right to complain. They may think that because the education is free, whatever their children learn is better than nothing. So they go AWOL. If those same parents pay school tuition for a private school with their hard-earned money, they complain loud and clear if the school doesn’t teach their children to read.

Another question is why public schools need all these parent-teacher conferences in the first place. Sure, parents getting involved in their kids’ education is a good thing, and can only help their children learn better. Home-schooling parents know this first hand. However, if you paid a tutor to teach your child to read, you expect him to know his job and earn his pay. If public schools were the education experts they claim to be, why do they need so much help from parents?

Children are learning machines. They love learning — that’s their nature. Learning is wired into their brains. You only have to watch children at play to confirm this truth. If children are passionate learners, why do public schools constantly need parents’ cooperation to push their kids to learn?

When children find something that interests them, no one has to push them to learn. In fact, kids constantly ask their parents hundreds of questions, and love when their mother or father teach them a new skill such as cooking or riding a bike. Millions of kids today are more computer literate than the average public-school teacher. I’ve seen articles about young children who were teaching their teachers how to use the computer. When most children learn a new skill they enjoy, they don’t need much parent involvement. Children often become so absorbed in their new toys or skills that they forget all about their parents, until mom calls them to dinner.

When children go to summer camp, they learn boating, archery, baseball, drawing, dancing, and camping skills. Do the camp counselors constantly call parents and ask for their help to get the kids to learn these skills? No. If anything, there is only one parent-visiting day the whole summer when kids show their parents all the exciting new things they’ve learned, without the parent’s involvement.

When self-motivated high-school graduates go to the college of their choice to study something they love, do college professors constantly whine that they need parent involvement? Do the professors tell parents to nag their children to study and do their homework? No. If anything, parents complain that their college kids don’t call them enough and only see them on holidays.

When children constantly need parental involvement to learn, something is terribly wrong.  As **John Holt, author of How Children Fail, points out, what is wrong is that public schools strangle children’s innate love of learning. In public school, passing the next test is the goal, not learning anything useful or interesting. Each child’s unique interests, strengths, and weaknesses are ignored for the sake of covering the material and making sure kids pass the standardized tests. Children must sit in a class full of maybe twenty-five other students for six to eight hours a day, and learn boring facts that don’t interest them, from often ill-trained or mediocre teachers. Is it any wonder that public schools can’t keep children interested, and cripple their natural passion to learn? That is why teachers and principals constantly complain that they need more parent cooperation and involvement. The schools wreck children’s love of learning, so they try to enlist parents to help undo the damage.

Low-income minority parents do not want to be AWOL. In fact, they fight for school choice because public schools hurt their children the most, and because they have the least options. George A. Clowes wrote recently in School Reform News, “African-Americans are no longer willing to accept that poverty and dysfunctional families are the reasons black children cannot learn. Black parents are demanding that their children be taught to read, write, compute, analyze, think.”

When the free market gives parents real school choice, these formerly AWOL parents become involved parents. Theodore J. Forstmann and his business partner John Walton are successful entrepreneurs with a passion for helping children get an education. They created a multimillion-dollar, private scholarship program called the Children’s Scholarship Fund. Forstmann and Walton pledged $100 million of their own money to fund 40,000 scholarships for  kids trapped in the worst public schools. With the help of other prominent business leaders and celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey, they raised another $70 million in matching funds. They made these scholarships open to low-income families across America.

The demand for these scholarships was explosive, especially from minority and low-income parents. These are the same parents that principals and teachers claim are AWOL from their kids’ education. Forstmann’s program received over 1,250,000 applications. In many areas, huge blocks of the eligible population applied: 26 percent in Chicago; 29 percent in New York, 33 percent in Washington, D.C., and 44 percent in Baltimore.

In his September, 1999 testimony before the U.S. House of Representative’s House Committee on the Budget, Forstmann pointed out that the incredible demand for his scholarships revealed a huge dissatisfaction with many of our public schools, and the need for alternatives.

In short, many parents go AWOL from public schools because they have little control over their kid’s education, the schools keep failing their children, and no matter how much they complain, nothing changes. When these same parents get school choice, all of a sudden they spend lots of time and energy on their children’s education.

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The reason for this time crunch, according to Mr. Chase, was that many unskilled or low-income minority parents work long hours for low wages, especially single mothers. Because they often have to work two jobs just to pay the bills, many single mothers don’t have time to attend parent-teacher conferences or to keep up with their children’s educational progress.

Mr. Chase talked about employers who don’t give single mothers paid leave, flextime, or day-care benefits so they can have more time for their children. So society, in the form of uncooperative employers (or allegedly needed laws that would force employers to be more cooperative), creates this time crunch for parents. Without society’s cooperation in this matter, the argument goes, parents don’t have the time and allegedly can’t give schools the backing and cooperation that teachers need. ²⁸

This argument doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. As we will see in Chapter 8, the average parent needs to spend only two to three hours a day home-schooling their children to give their kids a great education. Most working parents or even single moms could manage this if they schedule their time right. So employers don’t necessarily have to give parents flextime or paid leaves for parents to give their kids an excellent education at home.

For over two hundred years in this country, before public schools became entrenched by the 1890s, families of hard-working farmers, craftsmen, and even laborers managed to teach their children to read at home. Colonial farmers and laborers often worked from sun-up to sun-down, but still managed to find the time to teach their children to read, write, and do arithmetic. These parents didn’t blame “society.” They just made sure they found the time to educate their kids.

Paul Barton, working for the Educational Testing Service, conducted a 1993 study called “America’s Smallest School: The Family.” Barton found that one of the important factors determining a child’s educational performance was the presence or absence of two parents in the home. As evidence, he pointed out that North Dakota ranked first in math scores and second in the percentage of children in two-parent families, while the District of Columbia ranked next to last in math scores and last in two-parent families (meaning that it had the most single-parent homes). ²⁹

Barton’s study reflects a disturbing trend—American family stability has indeed declined badly over the last fifty years. George Will, one of our most thoughtful syndicated columnists, pointed out in one of his columns that the percentage of children born to unmarried women in 1958 was 5 percent. In 1980, it was 18 percent. By 1999, it was 33 percent. In 1999, 48.4 percent of all children born to women of all races and ethnic background, ages twenty to twenty-four — were born out of wedlock ³⁰

However, this explosion of single-mother families does not explain or justify public school’s never-ending failure. Neither do the long hours that low-income parents, single or married, must work. As noted earlier, if public schools knew their job, they would not need constant parental involvement. Also, children of these same hard-working mothers suddenly become much better students if they are lucky enough to transfer to a private school. In spite of poverty, society, or their uncooperative bosses, these parents push their kids to succeed in a Catholic or Protestant-affiliated private school. The fact that single mothers often work long hours has little to do with public-school failure.

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Many public-school authorities either distrust the free market or don’t have the faintest idea how it work. Yet, they live in a free market economy that gives them the highest standard of living in human history. These people live in big, clean houses on paved streets. They have cars, computers, televisions, refrigerators, electric lights, indoor plumbing, supermarkets full of fresh food, airlines to whisk them away to vacations in the Bahamas, and modern antibiotics that can save their lives. All these marvels are products of the free market.

Yet out of blindness or self-interest, many public-school officials either cannot or will not see this free-market miracle of progress for humankind. Many have contempt for the bountiful free market which they insult at every occasion, especially free-market education. Others fear the free market because they fear for their jobs if education was privatized.

Despite their dependence on the free market in their daily lives, education authorities  must attack it. Their livelihood depends on keeping the state-run public schools intact. To justify their tenure-guaranteed jobs and power, they must loudly defend the public schools and attack free-market education. To do  this, they must attack the free market itself.

In October 1995, Pepsi company officials announced in front of Jersey City Hall that Pepsi would donate thousands of dollars into a scholarship fund that helped low-income kids attend a private school of their choice. What was the immediate response of the local teachers’ union? They threatened the possibility of a statewide boycott of all Pepsi products. Pepsi vending machines in the city were vandalized. Three weeks after their announcement, Pepsi company officials withdrew their scholarship offer.³³

Why would a teachers’ union do this? As we noted earlier, teacher unions and many school employees view vouchers, whether private or governmental, as a threat to their jobs and the public-school system. Vouchers allow children to leave failed public schools and take tax money with them. Teacher unions don’t want to deliberately hurt children, but to protect their system at all costs, they try to chain students to the wretched public schools by fighting vouchers.

School authorities claim that children’s minds and futures should not be left in the hands of potentially dishonest, commercial, for-profit schools. To school authorities, making a profit seems to be incompatible with giving kids a good education.

Yet, most of the wonderful, time-saving, often life-saving products and services we buy in the free market are produced by for-profit companies. Take food, for example. As a basic necessity of life, food is more important than education. Without food, we die. Without education, we only lack knowledge. Would school authorities say that food production is too important to be left in the hands of the free market? Should we close down all our for-profit supermarkets and local grocery stores? Should local governments own and operate all farms and supermarkets, as the Soviet government did in communist Russia?

As noted earlier, the Soviet Union tried state-controlled collectivized farms for seventy years. The end result was seventy years of perpetual famine. Meanwhile, for-profit American farmers produced so much food that they exported millions of tons of wheat to the Soviets every year. In fact, for-profit American farmers produce so much food that federal bureaucrats now pay farmers subsidies to not grow food in order to prop up farm prices.

Do public-school authorities claim that for-profit farms, supermarkets, and local grocers do a bad job giving us fresh food every day?  I think not, because we do not hear teachers, principals, or school administrators clamoring for socialization of food production in this country. They don’t do so because for-profit farms and supermarkets make their lives better by giving them a huge variety of fresh food at reasonable prices. If we ever socialized food production in this country, I believe public-school employees would scream bloody murder because they would hate the rotten food and lousy service in the new government-run food stores.

Yet, when it comes to our government-controlled public-school education system, school authorities and employees defend the system to the death. One reason they may do so is because they personally benefit by the system, so are willing to turn a blind eye to its failures and overlook the damage it does to millions of school children.

As we noted in Chapter 1, public schools only became fully entrenched and compulsory in this country by the 1890s. Before then, for over 200 years, our education system was voluntary and mostly free-market. Parents were free to educate their kids at home or at relatively inexpensive local grammar schools, religious schools, or colleges. Education was widespread, literacy rates were over 90 percent in the major cities, and parents had complete control over their children’s education. The free-market education system worked great before public schools came along.

We also have an thriving education free-market in our pre-schools and colleges right now. Millions of parents pay for and enroll their kids in thousands of these private schools and colleges across the country. Parents are free to choose which pre-school, kindergarten, or college is best for their kids and can easily change schools if they are not satisfied with its performance. Most parents appreciate the choice and quality these schools offer. If the free market can give kids a great pre-school, kindergarten, or college education, there is no reason it cannot also give us a superb 1st through 12th education system if public schools were privatized.

Japan has proved how effective an education free-market can be. It has a thriving, multi-billion-dollar education industry called juku schools. These are private, for-profit “after-school” schools that Japanese children start as early as the first grade. The schools are so popular that by the fifth grade, 30 percent of students attend a juku school. In 1991, it was found that over half of eighth-graders and an estimated 70 percent of ninth-graders attended these schools. A Tokyo survey found that 90 percent of students had studied at a juku by the time they advanced to the ninth grade.

Why do millions of Japanese parents send their children to private juku schools? In Japan, competition is intense to get into the most prestigious universities because students who attend these universities get the best jobs after graduating. Entry into these universities strictly depends on admission-test scores.

In general, Japanese public schools give children a better and more disciplined education than our schools. However, Japanese parents who want their children to get into the best universities are often not satisfied with their children’s public-school education. Parents send their kids to juku schools for three primary reasons. They want to improve their child’s chances on high-stakes entrance exams, get remedial help for a child who is falling behind in public school, or give their child more advanced instruction if the child is a fast-learner and is not challenged by public-school instruction.

The juku system is huge, vibrant, and fiercely competitive because there is such a big demand for these schools. Instead of forcing a one-size-fits-all curriculum on all students, these schools cater to the needs of individual students and parents who are their customers. They ask what parents and students want and need and design their curriculums and teaching methods accordingly. In juku schools the parent-customer is king, not the public-school employees.

The schools test students before admission to discover their current academic skills and competence. Then, unlike public schools in America, they group students by ability, not age, so  class instruction can be specifically geared to students’ individual needs. Also, the schools don’t allow slower students to be “warehoused,” as that would be bad for business. Instead, school administrators give frequent tests to determine each student’s progress and then revise their curriculum or teaching methods to ensure that each student gets the exact kind and level of instruction he or she needs.

Slower students are therefore not embarrassed or humiliated in class as they are in America’s public schools that group children by age, not ability. Also, faster-learning students can study more challenging material and progress more quickly in their studies.

Teachers have a special and highly honored place in the juku system. There are no hiring or licensing restrictions for teachers as there are in Japanese public schools. The teachers come from many backgrounds. Some of them are professional educators, but many others are scientists, economists, college professors, other professionals, and even college students who like to teach. The fierce free-market competition between juku schools forces school owners to hire the best teachers they can find and dismiss those who are ill-trained or incompetent.

The juku system is also good for Japanese teachers. They enjoy giving individualized instruction to motivated students. Good teachers are appreciated both by their employers and parents. Their salaries are based on performance, not how long they have been teaching. Also, some top juku teachers who are in high demand earn as much as professional Japanese baseball players. Public-school teachers in America should take special note of this fact. It shows that a competitive free-market education system could give them high status and huge financial rewards if they do a great job educating children.

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This excuse is directly related to the previous one. School authorities point out that at least in a public-school system, local governments force parents to send their children to school and pay for this schooling through taxes. This compulsory system insures that even children from the poorest families get an education, even if this education is mediocre to miserable. In contrast, they argue, a free-market system in which children do not have a right to an education, can’t guarantee even a minimum education to children from poor families.

As we noted above, it is true that the free market can’t guarantee a quality education for all children. However, let’s look at some poverty statistics that clarify this issue further. According to U.S. Census Bureau data, the number of families living under the poverty line in the year 2002 was 7.2 million, or 9.6 percent of all American families.³⁹ Census Bureau data for 2002 also indicate that 11,704,000 children under 18 years old, lived in families below the official poverty line.⁴⁰

Let’s assume for the moment that a free-market education system could not find ways to give poor children a decent education (we will discuss ways that it can, very shortly). Under this assumption, about 11.7 million children living in poverty would not get educated (however we define educated). Now contrast this number with the fact that our public-school system, as we’ve seen, guarantees a third-rate education to the vast majority of public-school students (almost 45 million a year). Our public-schools also waste twelve years of children’s lives, warp their values, give millions of children mind-altering drugs, make kids hate learning, and cripple their ability to read.

Also, public schools already fail most inner-city children from low-income families. So how can school authorities claim we need public schools to ensure that poor children get a decent education? Would poor children be any worse off with a free-market education system than they already are in our public schools?

The answer is no, because in reality, a free-market system has a far greater chance of giving poor kids a quality education that public schools do. That’s because an education free-market is extremely flexible, and has many powerful ways to give poor parents real school choice that fits their budget. Before I discuss how an education free-market would do this, let me first clarify what I mean by this term.

An education free market would have no compulsory public schools — government would be out of the education business. As a result, there would be no compulsory attendance laws and no school taxes. All licensing laws would be scrapped. Anyone who wanted to teach any subject could do so without having to get a license. Also, anyone or any company who wanted to open a school could do so without having to get a license to operate. Parents would judge teachers or schools based on their reputation, competence, and real-world results. Parents would pay for their children’s education out of their own pockets, just as they now pay for their children’s food and clothing. However, they would only pay for their children’s education, not their neighbor’s, because school taxes would be gone.

The free market, together with the elimination of school taxes and regulations, can help the poorest parents educate their children in many ways:

First, state governments can use their lottery profits to pay for education scholarships for poor children. I consider state lotteries part of the free market because they are voluntary, as opposed to taxes, which are compulsory. If millions of people choose to gamble a few dollars on their state lottery every week, that is similar to their losing a few dollars a week playing the slot machines in a private casino.

In fiscal year 2003, 39 states grossed about $45 billion from their lotteries, and after payouts and expenses, had about $12 billion in net profits for education and other programs in their states.⁴¹ If we divided this $12 billion a year by the approximately 12 million children living under the poverty level that we discussed earlier, that comes out to about $1000 per child, per year. This $1000 a year scholarship could help poor parents pay part of the tuition for a Catholic or other private school.

But the potential benefits of lotteries can go way beyond this. There is no reason why state governments should have a legal monopoly on lotteries. If state gaming regulations that forbid private lotteries were scrapped, and big corporations then ran lotteries (far more efficiently), more billions of dollars could be raised for education. Local governments could induce private corporations to contribute part of their lottery profits to education scholarships by giving them tax credits for such contributions.

Today, state lottery money is dumped into failing public schools. This is a waste of precious money and resources, since the public-school system is beyond repair, no matter how much money it gets. Instead, once public schools were scrapped, every cent of state lottery profits could fund tuition scholarships for children from poor families.

Second, state and local governments can also offer tax credits to individuals or  businesses that contribute to an education fund used for scholarships for poor kids. In 1997, Arizona passed a law that let taxpayers deduct up to $500 from their taxes for contributing the same amount to a “tuition organization” that gives education scholarships to kids from poor families. As of this writing, Arizona has thirty-one such scholarship organizations. In 1999, over 30,000 Arizona residents contributed almost $14 million to these scholarship clearinghouses, which helped almost 7,000 low-income students attend private schools. Many other states have created similar tax credit programs, including Iowa, Illinois, and Minnesota, raising tens of millions of dollars in scholarship funds for poor children. ⁴²

Third, private donors are another source of funding to help low-income children get a decent education. Americans are enormously compassionate. In 2001, they gave over $187 million to various charities in New York State alone.⁴³ Many philanthropist-entrepreneurs have also created multimillion-dollar private scholarship programs for poor kids. One example I noted earlier is Theodore J. Forstmann’s $170 million Children’s Scholarship Fund that provides about 40,000 scholarships to poor kids.

Fourth, if we scrapped the public schools and eliminated all school taxes, every homeowner would get back thousands of dollars a year in tax refunds for school taxes they no longer had to pay. School tax refunds will help mostly middle-class families who own homes. However, everyone pays other state and local taxes that are used to support the public schools. If states lowered their general tax rates after they dismantled the public schools, everyone’s taxes would be less. Less state and local taxes would give low-income families extra money they could put aside for tutors or private-school tuition for their kids.

The greatest help for poor parents, however, would come from the free-market itself. If we no longer had public schools, the parents of 45 million school children would be shopping for education alternatives. This would create a huge, multi-billion dollar market for private teachers and schools. As a result, we would then see an explosion of new, low-cost, competitive schools created to meet this demand.

Every former public-school teacher could tutor children or open a small school in her home or a local, storefront space. Any adult with a special talent or knowledge could tutor neighborhood kids for a reasonable fee. Millions of retired people would teach for next to nothing just to be around children. Major corporations like Disney or Microsoft might enter the education business and create thousands of local schools throughout the country. Children could learn valuable skills and earn money in work-study programs with local businesses. Local entrepreneurs in minority areas could open low-cost neighborhood schools without having to worry about getting a license to operate. In Chapter 9, I will examine in depth other free-market education options, such as the new Internet schools, computer learning software, and home-schooling.

Cristo Rey Catholic School is one example of the many ways free-market schools can give poor kids a quality education. This school has created a study-work program in partnership with businesses to help cover tuition costs.

“Cristo Rey Jesuit High School is a  Catholic School in Chicago, where 93 percent of the students come from low-income families. To give these poor kids a chance in life, the school developed a creative new way to finance their private education that other cities are now adopting. Student tuition at Cristo Rey is about $8500 a year, but the poor kids pay only  about $2200. The students pay off the rest of the tuition by working five days each month, eight-hours a day, at participating banks, law firms, and other companies in Chicago. Each company pays about $25,000 a year in exchange for the clerical work done by four rotating students. This work-study-tuition program has paid off big for these kids; Currently, about 85 percent of the children in this program graduate and go to college. “

As noted earlier, for many years, the free market has been satisfying millions of parents’ need for quality private pre-schools, kindergartens, and colleges. When children are ready for college, parents have thousands of local or out-of-state colleges to chose from with a wide range of tuition costs. Many parents or high-school graduates take out college student loans and pay back the loans after they graduate. Parents could take out similar loans to pay for 1st through 12th grade education for their kids.

Fortunately, in an education free-market, parents would not have to pay tuition for twelve years of private school. Public schools have been around so long that most parents think that education requires going to a school for twelve years. Nothing can be farther from the truth.

In Chapter 1, I talked about John Taylor Gatto, New York City Teacher-of-the-Year in 1990. Mr. Gatto taught English and reading for twenty-six years in some of the worst public schools in New York City. Let me repeat here what Gatto wrote in his book, Dumbing Us Down, because it is worth repeating: “The truth is that reading, writing, and arithmetic only take about one hundred hours to transmit as long as the audience is eager and willing to learn.” ⁴⁵

One hundred hours is less than three months of public-school time for the average child. Even if we triple the time to three hundred hours for slow-learning or less enthusiastic kids, that’s still less than one year of school time to teach a child to read, write, and do basic arithmetic. This statistic is shocking if we remember that millions of public-school students take reading and English literature classes right into high school, yet still barely read at minimum levels by the time they graduate. If Gatto is right, parents would only have to send their children to a good free-market school (or pay a tutor) for a maximum of two years to become good readers and know basic arithmetic.

If most children could become proficient readers in two years, then why do they need public schools to waste twelve years of their lives? Most public-school education is a waste of time, anyhow. Whether kids learn history, science, or English literature, teachers tell kids to read the next chapter in a dumbed-down textbook, and then give them boring lectures and tests on that chapter. Very often, many children in the class have no interest whatsoever in the subject. Kids resent having to sit through these classes, so public-school “education” becomes a mind-numbing drudge.

Also, why should children waste their time studying trigonometry, biology, or foreign languages if these subjects bore them? Why should kids spend years studying a subject they will probably never use later in life, unless they really like the subject and will make it their college major? Why don’t we value our children’s time as much as we value our own?

Once children learned to read proficiently, if there were no compulsory attendance laws or required subjects to study, children could study whatever interests them, for as long as they like. Many parents might think I’m naïve to believe that children would read and study without being forced. That is because many kids who go to public school hate it. When children find a subject they’re interested in, they can be absorbed for hours on end. Kids love learning if you let them learn about something that fascinates them, and let them learn in their own way and at their own pace.

So parents would not have to send their children to school for eight to twelve years, as they do now. Most parents would only have to pay tuition to a quality free-market school for two years to make their children proficient readers. After learning to read well and do arithmetic, most kids could continue their education through self-study, tutors, Internet schools, computer learning software, home-schooling or other relatively inexpensive options.

Also, fierce competition would drive down tuition costs to levels that most parents, even the poorest, could afford. The free market would create so many new schools and options that we would have an education supermarket. Happily, most parents’ biggest worry would not be the cost of tuition. Their biggest worry would be trying to choose among the thousands of high-quality, low-cost tutors, local schools, computer software, and Internet schools competing for their business.

Most people who buy a car today finance the purchase with a car loan, paid off over four to five years. The average car today costs around $20,000. If children attended school in an education free market for only two to four years,  parents could similarly pay off the tuition costs with a bank loan. If tuition costs were about $5000 a year, parents could take out a $15,000 to $20,000 education loan, and pay it out over five years. Sharply reducing the time children must spend in “formal” schooling greatly expands parents’ financial options to pay tuition costs.

These are only a few of the ways a free-market education system could help poor parents give their kids a quality, low-cost education. So school authorities’ excuse that we need public schools to ensure that poor children get an education, doesn’t hold water.

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Fathers Network Seattle P-I — Do Dads Really Need Support Groups?

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How to Start a Gifted Advocacy Group: Parents Collaborate, Share …

Gifted advocacy groups provide networking opportunities for parents while offering support for educational programs for GT students. …

DDS: Family Support Groups

Aug 10, 2007 … Networking and socializing with other families Parent training and …Website links Regular Parent Support Group meetings Working with …

Lifepages – Resources for Families – Search Results

This coffee/networking group is sponsored by Arc. Parents of children with disabilities gather together for support, idea-sharing, and networking. …

RESULTS: Milestone #12: Building a Grassroots Community Network

… local food banks; or Head Start parent groups, individuals, or students. Again, you can play a part in gluing this network together to have maximum impact … Reaching Out to Community Groups and Officials. Why focus on networking? …

Online Support

Group Loop is an online community for support, education, and hope for teens with cancer and their parents. Networking options include online support groups …

Support Groups for Parents with Grown Adult Children Living at …

Numerous emails from parents needing help in finding support groups for parents …CafeMom is the largest support group/social networking site for moms and …

Weblogg-ed » Social Networking in Schools Gets a Boost from NSBA

Teachers can form groups of their own or start parent groups. Pemily, you asked me to explain how the functionality goes beyond networking …

Special Parents Information Network (SPIN)

41K); Networking opportunities through support groups, events, workshops and training, andparent-to-parent support. Resource Library of books, periodicals, …

Social Networking Software Engine & Social Publishing Platform.

Elgg is a leading open source social networking engine which can be used to power your social … Group discussion > Is parent group/subgroup possible? …

The Parents Insight Network Connects Companies With A Parent Test …

Apr 17, 2009 … Blog entry about The Parents Insight Network Connects Companies With …time to find out what people think through the use of test groups. ...

Parent Groups – Lake Washington School District

Parent groups are vitally important partners in the education of our students … parentalnetworking; parental empowerment; teacher support …

PPS Equity » Archive » New parent group: PPS Parent Union

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Kids in Barcelona - Parent Support Groups and Clubs

Feb 7, 2009 … Weekly music, singing and meeting groups for parents, babies and toddlers….. Barcelona Women’s Support Groups. Barcelona Women’s Network …

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Methods – Effective family – Mental Health Group – STAKES

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Here you will find many kinds of online Internet private schools. Some are full virtual schools. Others are Internet divisions of brick-and-mortar private schools. Some offer only accredited high school programs, others have junior high and high school programs, and some offer a full 1st -12th grade education.

Many are state-accredited schools that offer fully structured academic programs leading to a high school diploma. Others have a less structured curriculum or offer courses or tutoring on various subjects. You will also find university-affiliated 1st – 12th grade and high-school programs, and Christian-based 1st -12th grade schools.

Also, many of these schools will offer online assessment of your children’s current academic skill levels in reading and math. Research these sites to find Internet schools that best suit your children’s age and interests and the tuition costs you can comfortably afford. To find additional Internet sites, use search phrases like “online high-school,” “online K-12 school,” ‘internet schools,” “virtual schools,” and “university high-school programs.”

High-School programs

1. Compuhigh

2. Dennison Online Internet School

3. Keystone National High School

4. Citizen’s High School

5. James Madison Online High School

6. Thompson Education Direct

7. Alger Learning Center

8. The American School

9. CompassLearning Odyssey

10. EdAnywhere

11. North Atlantic Regional Schools

12. Phoenix Academy

13. Thompson Education Direct

14. Indiana University High School program :

15. University of Nebraska-Lincoln High School program

16. University of Texas at Austin High School program

University Accredited High-School Programs

Many state colleges and universities offer accredited high school programs. These are of particular interest to those students who plan to also attend one of these colleges after homeschooling.

Independent Study High School

Accredited classes through the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Four-year curriculum-based program, with diploma on graduation.

Indiana University High School Course & Diploma Programs

Fully accredited program, that  offers more than 100 distance education courses.

O.S.U. Precollege Programs

Oregon State offers high-school academic programs, providing an entry to higher education. It also has youth camps that offer physical sports and mental well-being.

Portland State University Independent Study

Offers fully accredited high school and undergraduate college-level courses via correspondence and online.

Texas Tech Extended Studies

Texas TEch offers Elementary through High School accredited courses. You can enroll at any time.

University of California Extension

Offers accredited high school classes such as English and math, US History, civics, physics, and health. Classes meet UC entrance requirements.

University of Iowa

This university has guided and accredited  Correspondence Study courses that are equivalent to their on-campus course work.

University of Missouri Center for Distance and Independent Study

Offers a fully accredited four-year high school diploma. They also offer Elementary/Middle School courses grades 3-8 in Math, Science, Social Studies and Language Arts.

University of Wisconsin Independent Learning

Offers a variety of credited high school courses, some online. View the course descriptions of all of our High School courses on their website.

University of Texas, Austin, High School Diploma Program

This is a fully accredited high-school diploma program run by the Texas Education Agency and provides quality curriculum, with over 45 excellent courses.

Grades K-12

17. The University of Oklahoma Independent Learning High School

18. North Texas Academy (grades 4 – 12)

19. The Odyssey Academy (grades K – 6)

20. Willoway 3D Learn (grades 5 – 12)

21. Advanced Academics (grades 7 -12, works with your local public-school district who may pay for tuition at Advanced Academics)

22. North Dakota University Division of Independent Study (grades 1 -12)

23. Texas Tech University Extended Studies (grades K – 12)

24. University of Missouri-Columbia Independent Study Program (grades 1- 12)

25. Stanford University Education Program For Gifted Youth (grades 1- 12)

26. University of Arizona Academic Outreach (grades 1 -12)

27. Allendale Academy (grades K-12)

28. Clonlara School (grades K -12)

29. K12 (grades K-12, nationwide Internet charter schools, and homeschool program)

30. The Trent Schools (grades 1-12)

31. Oak Meadow (grades K – 12, plus curriculum material for homeschooling parents)

32. Bradford Grove school (grades 1-12)

33. Active Learning Academy (grades 1 -12)

34. The Sycamore Tree (grades K-12  homeschool program)

35. Homeschool.com (grades 1 –

36. Home Study International (grades K – 12)

37. Alpha Omega Academy (grades 3 -12)

38. Laurel Springs School (grades – B12)

39. Eldorado Academy (grades K-12)

40. Sycamore Academy (grades 3 -12)

41. Christa McAuliffe Academy (grades K-12)

42. Bridgeway Homeschool Academy (grades K-12)

43. USA International Online School (grades K – 12)

44. Internet Home School (grades 1-12)

45. Internet Academy (grades K-12)

46. Waterford Academy (grades K–12 homeschool program)

47. Royal Academy (grades K-12)

Online Programs for Gifted Children

Do you have gifted and talented children? These special programs are geared toward  gifted and talented kids. The courses usually ask for qualifying IQ test results or other testing. These programs are fast-paced, and great for children who are highly motivated.

Accelerated Christian Education

Center for Talent Development at Northwestern University

Education Program for Gifted Youth (EPGY) at Stanford University

EPGY Online High School

Stanford’s online high school will offer two types of classes.

HP Telementor Program
This is a program from Hewlett-Packard that works with 5th – 12th grade students and college students from public, private and home school environments. The courses help students excel in math, science and career planning. No tuition charge, but you must apply to be accepted.

Irish Centre For Talented Youth
Program run through John Hopkins University in Dublin.

Johns Hopkins University Center for Talented Youth
For academically talented students in grades 2-8.  Fast-paced academic programs (both on-campus and internet-learning formats).

Trent Academy
Trent is an internet-based classroom. It has special programs for homeschool families with gifted and talented children. It is affiliated with HSLDA.

Christian-affiliated schools, usually grades K-12

48. Country Christian School (grades 1–12)

49. Aaron Academy (grades 1–12)

50. Agape Christian Academy (grades 1- 12)

51. Alpha-Omega Academy (grades K –12)

53. Crossroads Christian Schools (grades K-12)

54. Deseret Academy (grades K-12)

54. Eagle Christian School (grades 7 -12)

56. Home Study International (grades K-12)

57. Lincoln Christian Academy (grades 1-12)

58. Northstar Academy (greades 7-12)

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DriversEd.com

Drivers Ed Course

Drivers License By State

Car Maintenance 4 Teens

Distance Learning Drivers Ed

Learn Safe Driving

Rules of the Road

For Younger Kids

Bicycling
Car Games

For Parents or Instructors

Homeschooling Drivers Ed

Driving Instruction Tips

Drivers Ed on Other Homeschool Sites

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“Public educators, like Soviet farmers, lack any incentive to produce results, innovate, to be efficient, to make the kinds of difficult changes that private firms operating in a competitive market must make to survive.” — Carolyn Lochhead

Here’s another argument that public-school bureaucrats use to “justify” their monopoly control over our children’s minds and lives. They claim that we cannot trust the free-market to educate our children because too many free-market (private) schools are greedy for profits, cheat parents and students, take their money, make wild promises, or go out of business.

Look at the trade-school scandals a few years ago, they say. Phony trade schools cheated students with bad teaching and empty promises. This is typical of the free market, they say.

No, it is not typical — rather, the opposite.

The few bad apples in any field in the free market are just that — the exceptions. The free market has a harsh task master called competition. Fierce competition in an education free market acts the same way it does for any product we buy, whether cars, food, or computers. Fierce competition forces all competitors to keep improving their product’s quality, lowering the cost, and giving better service to their customers, or risk going out of business.

To succeed, a free-market school owner must prove that his school is better than his competitors. All free-market (private) schools have to prove their excellence to skeptical parents — their customers. If a school does not live up to its claims, parents are merciless. Like switching channels on TV, parents can and do switch to a better school, for they love their children and want their money’s worth.

Yes, there are always a few rotten apples in any field, but competition forces the vast majority of apples in the barrel to be healthy. Parents are not stupid or fools. They would quickly see if Johnny reads better or worse. It does not take four years of meaningless education courses in a so-called teacher college to figure that out. Like a rising tide, fierce competition would force all educational boats to rise. Computers get faster, cheaper, and more powerful every year. Similarly, in a free-market education system, educational quality and innovation would explode, while competition would drive down the cost of tuition.

In a fiercely-competitive education free-market, your child would quickly learn the basics in safe, competent, innovative schools, rather than wasting twelve years in violent, drug-infested, chronically-incompetent government schools.

Also, what hypocrisy for the rotten orchard of government schools to point their finger at a few bad apples in the “private” sector. For in these monopoly government schools, the situation is completely reversed. The whole system, the whole government-controlled barrel is rotten, and the education for our kids is abysmal at worst or third rate at best. In a free-market school system, the bad schools would be the exception. In a government-controlled school system, the good schools are the exception.

You see, government (public) schools are a never-ending education disaster because they have absolutely NO accountability to parents. The schools’ teachers, principals, and administrators are civil-service government workers who are paid by their local State or city government, not directly by parents (as is the case with private-school owners). Yes, there are some good, dedicated teachers in the public schools, but the system breeds mediocrity on a massive scale, and it is the system that parents have to put up with.

Year after year, compulsory taxes prop up these schools, no matter how bad they are. Compulsory school taxes also pay teachers, principals, and administrators’ salaries, no matter how bad or mediocre these tenured government employees are.

So, no matter how bad these schools are, or how miserable the education they give our kids, parents are impotent to make changes in the system. That is also because every state has compulsory attendance laws that force parents to bring their children to these government schools (if they cannot afford a private school), whether they like it or not. In effect, these schools are government-enforced education prisons, both for parents and their children.

The difference between government and free-market schools is this — when government schools are rotten, when they dumb-down our kids with nonsense education theories that fail, 45 million children can suffer for twelve years, without parents having any recourse. If and when an entrepreneur-owned free-market school is bad, only a handful of children suffer for a few months while parents shop for a better school — with parents having full recourse and freedom of choice.

Public-school apologists criticizing private-schools for allegedly not being accountable to parents is a sick joke, but a joke that is tragic for our children. To education bureaucrats who point to alleged bad apples in the “private” education sector, we can only say — “Doctor, heal thyself.”

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* Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive . . . . . those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. – C. S. Lewis

One of the most common arguments that school authorities use to justify public schools is that all children have a “right” to an education. Public-school apologists claim that all children have a right to an education, and that only the existence of a massive, compulsory, government-controlled public-school system can “guarantee” that right.

As I will explain below, the claim that all children have a right to an education ends up hurting the very children it was intended to help. I will therefore ask a seemingly shocking question – do all children have a right to an education? If they do, public-school apologists are correct in assuming that we need government to guarantee that right so no child gets left behind.

What is an economic right such as the alleged right to an education? A right means that a person has a claim on the rest of society (other Americans) to give him some product or service he wants, regardless of whether he can pay for it or not. For example, if we claimed that everyone has a right to a car, that would mean if someone couldn’t afford a car, government would give that person the money to buy it (the payment might be called a car voucher).

Similarly, if we say that all children have a right to an education, regardless of their parent’s ability to pay tuition, then only government can guarantee this alleged right. Government has to guarantee this right because no private, for-profit school will admit a student if the parents don’t pay tuition (unless the student gets a scholarship). If a private school doesn’t get paid for its services, it soon goes out of business.

Local or state governments can guarantee this alleged right in two basic ways. They can own and operate all the public schools and force all children to attend these schools, or they can give subsidies (vouchers) to parents to pay for tuition in the private school of their choice. Since most school authorities strongly oppose vouchers, that means they support only a government-controlled system of compulsory public schools and school taxes to guarantee children this alleged right to an education.

But government produces nothing by itself. Government gets its money by taxing us. To guarantee this alleged right to a product or service, government tax collectors must therefore take money from one person to give it to another. They must take from Peter to pay Paul, as the saying goes. So, in effect, a person who demands food, housing, or medical care as an alleged right, is really demanding that government tax agents steal money from his neighbor to give him an unearned benefit he didn’t work for.

Education, like housing or medical care, does not grow free in nature. Just as someone must pay doctors, nurses, and hospitals for all the services they provide, someone must also pay for teachers’ salaries, textbooks, janitorial services, and school upkeep. Other than air, nothing that we need is free.

The average public school now gets over $7,500 a year per student, paid from compulsory taxes. To guarantee education as a “right,” local, state, and federal governments must tax all Americans to pay for public schools. All of us are taxed, whether or not we have school-age children or think these schools are worth paying for. So when some parents claim that their children have a right to an education, they are really demanding that their local or state government steal money from their neighbors to pay for their children’s education.

Here’s an analogy that might help clarify this issue. Imagine that your unemployed neighbor comes to you and asks you to lend him money to pay for his children’s education. You reply that, though you sympathize with his problem, your answer is no. He responds by saying that he is poor, points out that you have a big house and a job, and insists that his children have a “right” to an education. You say, “Sorry, my answer is still no because I need my money for my own children’s education.” Suppose that your neighbor then gets real mad, pulls out a gun, puts it to your head, and says, “I asked you nicely. I told you my children need an education. You have a job, and I’m unemployed, so you have a moral duty to give me your money.” Then he clicks back the hammer on the gun.

Does your neighbor have the right to put a gun to your head and steal your money because his children “need” an education? He has no such right. Nor does he, or any number of your neighbors, have the right to rob you by getting government to be their enforcer – by pressuring local governments to take your money through school taxes. Any school system that uses compulsory taxes is a system based on the notion that theft is moral if it’s for a good cause. No goal, not even educating children, justifies legalized theft.

It is only natural that all parents want the best education for their children, but do good intentions justify stealing from your neighbor? A mugger on the street who puts a knife to your throat and demands your money also has good intentions – he wants to make his life better with your money. One of the Ten Commandments says, “Thou shalt not steal.” It does not say, “Thou shalt not steal, except if you need tuition money to educate your child.” Since no one has a right to steal from his neighbor, no one, including children, has a “right” to an education.

Some might argue that I may be correct on this issue when it comes to adults, but surely we can’t punish innocent children for their parent’s failures? Just because parents are poor or unemployed, why should innocent children suffer and be denied an education? The answer to that question is one that many people find hard to accept, yet it is true – there are no guarantees in life, not for adults or for children. Good intentions to alleviate a problem do not justify hurting other people by stealing from them. Two wrongs do not make a right.

Moreover, if we agree that children have a right to an education because their parents are poor, then shouldn’t they also have a right to food, a bicycle, a nice house in the suburbs, and designer clothes? If poor kids (and all children) have an alleged right to an education, don’t they also have an alleged right to everything else that other kids have whose parents are well-off? Why not then say that anyone, poor, middle-class, or rich who has less money than his neighbor, has the “right” to steal from his neighbor? Where do we stop if some people can legally steal from others because they claim their kids need this or that?

The answer is, we don’t stop, and we haven’t stopped. That is why our country has turned into a devouring welfare state that is drowning in debt. When I use the word “welfare,” I don’t mean only for the poor. Rich, poor, and middle-class alike in America now claim the right to everything from corporate tax breaks and subsidies, to price supports for farmers, to Medicare, to rent subsidies for unwed mothers. When we let government steal money from taxpayers to give unearned benefits or subsidies to special-interest groups, we open up a Pandora’s box. We become a nation of thieves stealing from each other. Is this what we want America to become?

It is true that a free market does not and can not guarantee that all children have enough to eat or live in a comfortable house. Likewise, a free-market education system in which all parents have to pay for their children’s education obviously can’t guarantee a quality education for every child.

However, government-controlled public schools also can’t guarantee that every child gets a quality education. These failed schools can barely teach our children to read. Also, neither system can make guarantees because there are no guarantees in life, and because each child’s abilities, personality, and family background are so different that such guarantees are impossible. The real question, then, is not which system is perfect, but which system is more likely to give the vast majority of children a quality education that most parents could afford?

Public schools fail and betray millions of children, year after year. The only “right” the public-school system gives to school children is the right to suffer through a mind-numbing, third-rate education for twelve years.

In contrast, the free-market, while not perfect, gives us all the wondrous goods and services we buy every day, such as cars, fresh food, computers, refrigerators, and televisions. The superbly efficient and competitive free market gives us all these marvelous products at prices that most people can afford. Even the poorest American families today have a car, refrigerator, and sometimes two televisions in their homes. If we want to discover which system would give the vast majority of children a quality education at reasonable prices, I think we have the answer – the free market, hands down.

We therefore don’t need a failed public-school system to enforce an alleged right to an education, when there is no such right in the first place. Each parent should be responsible for paying for their own children’s education, just as they pay for their children’s food or clothing.

Finally, public-school apologists use this alleged right to an education to justify keeping the public-school dinosaur alive, in spite of these schools’ never-ending failure. Many public-school apologists who claim that children have a right to an education do so out of good intentions. They want to give all children a chance to get a decent education. But good intentions mean worse than nothing if they lead to dismal consequences. This alleged right to an education lets government bureaucrats have tyrannical control over our children’s minds and future.

The “right” to an education requires a massive government-controlled public-school system to enforce that right. But it is this same public-school system that cripples the education and lives of millions of children. So, ironically, the alleged right to an education is the worst thing we can offer our children.

Most low-income families don’t need government education handouts anymore in the form of allegedly “free” public schools. Parents today can buy quality, low-cost food in a competitive, free-market food industry full of grocery stores and supermarkets. In the same way, parents today can give their kids a quality education using low-cost Internet private schools and homeschooling.

Only when we reject the notion that all children have a “right” to an education will we get government out of the education business, permanently. Only a fiercely-competitive free-market education system can give kids the quality, low-cost education they deserve.

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The following letter to College Admission boards by Caitlin Guthrie Freeman describes her experiences as a homeschooled student. Her letter will give you an idea of what homeschooling (or low-cost Internet private schools) can be like for your children. This is just one homeschooling student’s experience, but it reveals the typical enthusiasm and passion for learning that your child can get from homeschooling:

“I am writing this letter in the hope of answering the two questions that you might have for any homeschooler: Why do I homeschool, and How do I do it?

After graduating from the Antioch School, a private alternative school connected with Antioch College, I decided to spend my seventh grade year at Ridgewood, a private prep school. This was instead of going on to Yellow Springs Junior High like most of my friends. I chose Ridgewood primarily for one reason: the students. They were happy, lively, accepting, and seemed very interested in their work.

Although I received very good grades, and did very well academically at Ridgewood, I found that my learning was very controlled and prescribed. At the Antioch School I had always been encouraged to take charge of my own learning. But at Ridgewood everyone was expected to move along with everyone else, plodding at a universal pace that was too fast for some and infinitely too slow for others. It was expected that we would accommodate our learning for the good of the class; no one was allowed to move out of the mundane rhythm and learn for themselves. Our minds were not our property, they belonged to a communal brain bank and no one could make a withdrawal without their other classmates taking out the exact same amount. For example, although grammar had always been very easy for me, and though I had always received “A”s, I was still often expected to complete four grammar assignments per night along with everyone else in the class, whether or not I needed them. I often found I did not have the time for my own interests or my own learning.

I left Ridgewood for the last time in June of 1993 with a firm idea in my head: I was not going back the next year; I was going to homeschool. My parents and I had discussed this at length during the second half of my seventh grade year. There was so much I wanted to do, so many things I wanted to accomplish that I knew would not be possible if I remained at Ridgewood. So, that last day, after saying farewell to my friends and telling them I would not be returning the next year, I finally started to live my life.

That first year of homeschool was filled with such an incredible sense of elation. I had the sense of limitless time, and the feeling I could learn everything and accomplish anything. Each day I had hundreds of little grab bags set before me, each filled with something new to experience, new to learn. I was free and encouraged to plunge my eager hands into as many of these grab bags of knowledge as I could. I became enamored of archaeology and paleontology, and poured at length over my many references and fact finders.

I read Isaac Asimov’s The Realm of Algebra as part of my math course. I discovered a love of Shakespeare and that I had a knack for learning and comprehending his rich language after being cast in Twelfth Night. I worked on a public access television show and got to conduct a special television interview with children’s author, Virginia Hamilton. I began singing with the Dayton Choral Academy. I also discovered opera that year, and found that I could not get enough of Le Nozze di Figaro, Faust, and Die Zauberflote. I became a member of the Yellow Springs High School Drama Club, and acted in my first pre-professional musical, Jesus Christ, Superstar, under the superb direction of Marcia C. Nowik. It was an amazing year, filled with freedom, learning, field trips, theatre performances, and all sorts of other experiences.

Today, as I look back on that first homeschool year, I realize that, although I have matured and changed, my love and drive for acquiring knowledge is still as strong — I am still as elated by the process of learning as I was in eighth grade. I am still just as busy; my days are still as packed with activity as when I was fourteen.

This I hope, gives a sense of why I home school. Now let me explain how I do it. In between the intense bursts of driven energy that make up all my classes, I relax, or read, or work with my friends. Some are homeschoolers, some are not, some live in Yellow Springs, and some live hundreds or even thousands of miles away and keep in touch with me over the Internet. My life is far from being socially empty as some believe homeschoolers’ lives must be. I converse on-line each day with people I met while at Interlochen Arts Camp, and consider them to be some of my best friends. Really good friends are hard to come by, and it really doesn’t matter whether they are across the country or right next door.

My homeschooling friends have taught me that there are about as many ways to homeschool as there are homeschoolers. I have one friend whose work is completely unstructured. She learns by employing only hands on techniques (creating a budget or measuring ingredients to bake a cake is her math program; her English and grammar come from reading and writing). There are many homeschoolers who employ this unschooling approach to learning, and for many it is very successful.

I have another friend, however, whose entire life is structure. She works completely out of text books and school curricula, reading only to write book reports, studying and learning only for the next homework assignment. She studied at home with an extremely accelerated curriculum for two years, and then graduated to go to college at the age of fifteen.

Although I chose to homeschool to free my schedule, to open up new possibilities for learning, and to allow myself more time to accomplish my own work, being busy creates its own schedule. I have to have a definite routine to accomplish what I want to. It is a routine I set for myself — or that is often set for me by my many outside classes: French, Italian, voice lessons, Shakespeare, Theatre, and Horseback.

If I do have a free space that has not been scheduled with a class or my homework, I always seem to find something to fill it. I keep to a regular practice schedule for voice, and always do math and French each weekday morning. I read, write, do science or history, and often do more French in the afternoon. In addition, I have my lessons.

It is a bit of a paradox. I both have what seems like unlimited time to complete projects, and extreme time constraints brought on by my homework, lessons, and classes. However, I do have a flexibility which allows me to prioritize and alter my schedule when some opportunity comes up. This January, for instance, I may be traveling to New York City to attend the 10th Anniversary performance of The Phantom of the Opera by Andrew Lloyd Webber. But there is always daily practice and the responsibilities of classes, homework, rehearsals and performances. I am always busy.

Many of my classes are basically self taught in that I am both the teacher and the student, although they are supported by my parents or by weekly lessons with a teacher or tutor. But I have to find a way to use and build on what we’ve done together between my lessons.

An example of how I organize my homeschool is the way in which my writing course is done. My parents assign me essay topics or research projects, and help provide some of the information or books I might need to get started. I am currently researching the English translations of Le Fantome de l’Opera (The Phantom of the Opera) by Gaston Leroux. Over eighty pages were omitted in the Alexander Teixeiros de Mattos translation, and I am trying to find out why. In addition, in the different translations that I have read, each translator seems to have a different style and a different understanding of the French language which colors the way the story is perceived by the reader.

I am also working on translating part of the original text into English. I would like to be able to find the time to translate the entire book and create my own definitive translation of Le Fantome. This is something that I am really looking forward to.

I believe choosing to homeschool has been one of the most positive decisions I have made in my life. It has given me freedom of time and choice, the freedom with which to explore my interests, to follow tangents and delve into a subject. Because of homeschooling I have been able to focus on the theatre and music and language in a way that is denied to most people my age. I have learned early to appreciate the wisdom of Shakespeare, the beauty of opera, and the heart and soul of theatre. I know I would not have been able to do this without the vehicle of homeschool supporting and carrying me along the way.”

Caitlin’s letter should give you some idea of the options and flexibility you have in designing a homeschooling program for your kids, as well as how exiting, rewarding, and effective homeschooling can be for your children. Every child’s interests will be different, but that is the beauty of homeschooling. After learning to read and write, each child can study whatever subjects excite them. Learning by homeschooling can become a joyful and rewarding experience, instead of 12 years of mindless drudgery in public schools.

Also, low-cost Internet private schools can give your kids the same, great homeschooling education, yet do 90 percent of the homeschooling work for you. These quality, accredited, internet private schools are therefore great for working parents who have less free time for homeschooling than a stay-at-home parent. Best of all, many of these internet private schools cost less than $1000 a year tuition (that’s only about $85 a month, or $22 a week!).

Many of the homeschooling, general information, and parent-organization websites listed in the Resource section of my book, “Public Schools, Public Menace,” can also give you an idea of what homeschooling can be like. These websites have many true stories by parents who describe their homeschooling experiences, and offer homeschooling tips. Also, two wonderful books I can recommend will also give you an idea of what homeschooling can be like for you and your children. They are: Homeschooling For Excellence, by David and Micki Colfax (Warner Books), and The Unschooling Handbook, by Mary Griffith (Prima Publishing).

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One of the most common arguments that school authorities use to justify public schools is that all children have a “right” to an education. Public-school apologists claim that all children have a right to an education, and that only the existence of a massive, compulsory, government-controlled public-school system can “guarantee” that right.

As I will explain below, the claim that all children have a right to an education ends up hurting the very children it was intended to help. I will therefore ask a seemingly shocking question – do all children have a right to an education? If they do, public-school apologists are correct in assuming that we need government to guarantee that right so no child gets left behind.

What is an economic right such as the alleged right to an education? A right means that a person has a claim on the rest of society (other Americans) to give him some product or service he wants, regardless of whether he can pay for it or not. For example, if we claimed that everyone has a right to a car, that would mean if someone couldn’t afford a car, government would give that person the money to buy it (the payment might be called a car voucher).

Similarly, if we say that all children have a right to an education, regardless of their parent’s ability to pay tuition, then only government can guarantee this alleged right. Government has to guarantee this right because no private, for-profit school will admit a student if the parents don’t pay tuition (unless the student gets a scholarship). If a private school doesn’t get paid for its services, it soon goes out of business.

Local or state governments can guarantee this alleged right in two basic ways. They can own and operate all the public schools and force all children to attend these schools, or they can give subsidies (vouchers) to parents to pay for tuition in the private school of their choice. Since most school authorities strongly oppose vouchers, that means they support only a government-controlled system of compulsory public schools and school taxes to guarantee children this alleged right to an education.

But government produces nothing by itself. Government gets its money by taxing us. To guarantee this alleged right to a product or service, government tax collectors must therefore take money from one person to give it to another. They must take from Peter to pay Paul, as the saying goes. So, in effect, a person who demands food, housing, or medical care as an alleged right, is really demanding that government tax agents steal money from his neighbor to give him an unearned benefit he didn’t work for.

Education, like housing or medical care, does not grow free in nature. Just as someone must pay doctors, nurses, and hospitals for all the services they provide, someone must also pay for teachers’ salaries, textbooks, janitorial services, and school upkeep. Other than air, nothing that we need is free.

The average public school now gets over $7,500 a year per student, paid from compulsory taxes. To guarantee education as a “right,” local, state, and federal governments must tax all Americans to pay for public schools. All of us are taxed, whether or not we have school-age children or think these schools are worth paying for. So when some parents claim that their children have a right to an education, they are really demanding that their local or state government steal money from their neighbors to pay for their children’s education.

Here’s an analogy that might help clarify this issue. Imagine that your unemployed neighbor comes to you and asks you to lend him money to pay for his children’s education. You reply that, though you sympathize with his problem, your answer is no. He responds by saying that he is poor, points out that you have a big house and a job, and insists that his children have a “right” to an education. You say, “Sorry, my answer is still no because I need my money for my own children’s education.” Suppose that your neighbor then gets real mad, pulls out a gun, puts it to your head, and says, “I asked you nicely. I told you my children need an education. You have a job, and I’m unemployed, so you have a moral duty to give me your money.” Then he clicks back the hammer on the gun.

Does your neighbor have the right to put a gun to your head and steal your money because his children “need” an education? He has no such right. Nor does he, or any number of your neighbors, have the right to rob you by getting government to be their enforcer – by pressuring local governments to take your money through school taxes. Any school system that uses compulsory taxes is a system based on the notion that theft is moral if it’s for a good cause. No goal, not even educating children, justifies legalized theft.

It is only natural that all parents want the best education for their children, but do good intentions justify stealing from your neighbor? A mugger on the street who puts a knife to your throat and demands your money also has good intentions – he wants to make his life better with your money. One of the Ten Commandments says, “Thou shalt not steal.” It does not say, “Thou shalt not steal, except if you need tuition money to educate your child.” Since no one has a right to steal from his neighbor, no one, including children, has a “right” to an education.

Some might argue that I may be correct on this issue when it comes to adults, but surely we can’t punish innocent children for their parent’s failures? Just because parents are poor or unemployed, why should innocent children suffer and be denied an education? The answer to that question is one that many people find hard to accept, yet it is true – there are no guarantees in life, not for adults or for children. Good intentions to alleviate a problem do not justify hurting other people by stealing from them. Two wrongs do not make a right.

Moreover, if we agree that children have a right to an education because their parents are poor, then shouldn’t they also have a right to food, a bicycle, a nice house in the suburbs, and designer clothes? If poor kids (and all children) have an alleged right to an education, don’t they also have an alleged right to everything else that other kids have whose parents are well-off? Why not then say that anyone, poor, middle-class, or rich who has less money than his neighbor, has the “right” to steal from his neighbor? Where do we stop if some people can legally steal from others because they claim their kids need this or that?

The answer is, we don’t stop, and we haven’t stopped. That is why our country has turned into a devouring welfare state that is drowning in debt. When I use the word “welfare,” I don’t mean only for the poor. Rich, poor, and middle-class alike in America now claim the right to everything from corporate tax breaks and subsidies, to price supports for farmers, to Medicare, to rent subsidies for unwed mothers. When we let government steal money from taxpayers to give unearned benefits or subsidies to special-interest groups, we open up a Pandora’s box. We become a nation of thieves stealing from each other. Is this what we want America to become?

It is true that a free market does not and can not guarantee that all children have enough to eat or live in a comfortable house. Likewise, a free-market education system in which all parents have to pay for their children’s education obviously can’t guarantee a quality education for every child.

However, government-controlled public schools also can’t guarantee that every child gets a quality education. These failed schools can barely teach our children to read. Also, neither system can make guarantees because there are no guarantees in life, and because each child’s abilities, personality, and family background are so different that such guarantees are impossible. The real question, then, is not which system is perfect, but which system is more likely to give the vast majority of children a quality education that most parents could afford?

Public schools fail and betray millions of children, year after year. The only “right” the public-school system gives to school children is the right to suffer through a mind-numbing, third-rate education for twelve years.

In contrast, the free-market, while not perfect, gives us all the wondrous goods and services we buy every day, such as cars, fresh food, computers, refrigerators, and televisions. The superbly efficient and competitive free market gives us all these marvelous products at prices that most people can afford. Even the poorest American families today have a car, refrigerator, and sometimes two televisions in their homes. If we want to discover which system would give the vast majority of children a quality education at reasonable prices, I think we have the answer – the free market, hands down.

We therefore don’t need a failed public-school system to enforce an alleged right to an education, when there is no such right in the first place. Each parent should be responsible for paying for their own children’s education, just as they pay for their children’s food or clothing.

Finally, public-school apologists use this alleged right to an education to justify keeping the public-school dinosaur alive, in spite of these schools’ never-ending failure. Many public-school apologists who claim that children have a right to an education do so out of good intentions. They want to give all children a chance to get a decent education. But good intentions mean worse than nothing if they lead to dismal consequences. This alleged right to an education lets government bureaucrats have tyrannical control over our children’s minds and future.

The “right” to an education requires a massive government-controlled public-school system to enforce that right. But it is this same public-school system that cripples the education and lives of millions of children. So, ironically, the alleged right to an education is the worst thing we can offer our children.

Most low-income families don’t need government education handouts anymore in the form of allegedly “free” public schools. Parents today can buy quality, low-cost food in a competitive, free-market food industry full of grocery stores and supermarkets. In the same way, parents today can give their kids a quality education using low-cost Internet private schools and homeschooling.

Only when we reject the notion that all children have a “right” to an education will we get government out of the education business, permanently. Only a fiercely-competitive free-market education system can give kids the quality, low-cost education they deserve.

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find valuable and informative

* www.hslda.com — Home School Legal Defense Association — this great organization protects the interests of homeschooling parents

* www.edweek.org -– EdWeek.org — website keeps you up to date on education news related to public-school alternatives, school choice, charter schools, and much more.

* www.math-and-reading-help-for-kids.org — Math and Reading Help For Kids  — good resource for teaching your children math and reading skills.

* http://www.nais.org —National Association of Independent Schools — great resource for finding a quality private school for your children

* http://www.homeschool.com —  Homeschool.com — Everything you want to know about homeschooling — resources, curriculumm, parent networking, homeschooling tips, and much more.

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Here are some typical policies the Obama/Democrat/Liberal-looters now suggest to “solve” America’s problems:

“We” need to give health care to all people with a “non-profit” socialized-medicine system (the same system that wrecked medical care in England and Canada?, and paid for by whom?).

“We” need to give all kids tuition money for a college education (a socialist, anti-American-values education presided over by Marxist professors?, and paid for by whom?).

“We” need pre-school for all children from age two years old, especially minority kids (with or without the consent of parents?, and paid for by whom?).

“We” need “parent education” programs to teach parents how to raise their kids (the parent-police in Hillary Clinton’s “village” that “raises” children).

“We” need more federal programs to cure AIDS, for AIDS education, and to pay for drug addicts’ needles (why should we pay for other people’s drug habits and unprotected sex that cause most of the AIDS?).

“We” have to raise taxes on the “rich” to pay for all these multi-billion dollar programs (which kills the goose that lays the golden egg—it’s the productive “rich” who create the jobs the poor depend on).

“We” need to spend more billions of dollars on government (public) schools (that’s like throwing money down a toilet).

“We” need to spend billions of dollars to solve global warming (human-caused global warming is a deliberate hoax designed to destroy our liberty and free economy).

“We” have to take money from the oil companies to fund alternative energy programs (yes, “take” is what Hillary Clinton said in a previous speech. “Take,” as in “loot”).

“We” have to end the imbecile Iraq war that is bankrupting us. But, God forbid, we will NOT give the billions of dollars we spend on the war back to you, the taxpayers. We’ll keep your money and give it away to every petty looter and special-interest group who’ll vote us into office.

“We” have to stop companies from moving overseas and not paying heavy corporate taxes (companies want to run from strangling US taxes and regulations — why shouldn’t they?).

“We” have to tax the rich (who earned their money) to pay for welfare, farm subsidies, employment programs for minorities, and dozens of other giveaway programs (why should these people get unearned handouts they didn’t work for?).

“We” have to make sure the “rich” pay their “fair share” of taxes (“fair share” means to loot money from brilliant, productive businessmen who earn more than others with their superior ambition and hard work, and give this stolen loot to less productive people who do not produce jobs for others).

And on and on it goes. “We” have to help this group. “We” have to help that group. “We” have to raise taxes or take money from the “rich” to pay for all this looting.

“We” is the Democrats’ and liberals’ killer word. They mean that “we” are our brothers’ keeper, whether we like it or not. “We” must sacrifice our lives, our work, our hard-earned money to pay for any looters who want to take our money, courtesy of government-elected thieves.

“We” is an attempt to make you forget the word “I,” as in “I” earned my money and “you” don’t have a right to take it from me.

The Democrat-looter Presidential candidates all claimed the right to tax us to death to pay for uninsured people’s health care (including Mexican illegal aliens), unemployed peoples’ training, tenured-teachers unearned pay raises, congenitally-incompetent public schools’ unending failure, government workers who get rich on these programs, and every other whining special-interest group who demands government hand-outs at your expense.

Let’s be clear on one thing. You are NOT your brother’s keeper, and no government you elect has the right to force you to be. “Compassion” enforced at the end of a government gun (taxes) is naked compulsion. Every program that looting liberals promote with their “we” forces you to be your brother’s keeper, whether you like it or not. In effect, Democrats tell you, “your money or your life.”

There is only one way to fight the Democrats’ vicious moral notion that “we” are our brother’s keeper. Like a prayer, keep repeating the words that you have the God-given right to keep every cent you earn. Your property is not someone else’s “resource” to spend as they please. Liberal looters who spout their “we” think your hard-earned money is theirs for the taking. They think of you as an expendable sacrificial animal. They think that your duty is to work for the money, but they have the right to spend it.

To fight the liberal looters, keep repeating like a prayer, “My money and property are mine—I earned it. No politician I elect has the right to steal my money to give away to others.” It’s as simple as that.

If you accept the Democrats’ deadly “we,” you fall into their trap. You accept the vicious socialist and fascist moral notion that you are your brother’s keeper. You accept the notion that the people you elect to office have the right to loot your hard-earned money to enforce that notion. You accept the fact that those you elect to office have the right to make you into a slave—to work your whole life for the benefit of others.

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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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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

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

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The answer to this concern is, can you risk not trying? Isn’t your child’s future worth the risk? If you see that your child is getting a bad education in public school, the worst thing to do is nothing. Then there is no chance of improvement. If you leave your children in public school, chances are great that their ability to read, self-esteem, and love of learning may be damaged, and they can waste twelve years of their lives. Look at the potential consequences to your child if you don’t try other education alternatives.

The real question is this: Is good enough, good enough for your child? Your child is unique and precious. He or she is born with a love of learning and a unique potential. Your child’s love of learning, self-confidence, and potential can be squashed in the rigid atmosphere of public schools. Is a third-rate public-school education good enough for your child. If you could give your child a rich, fun, rewarding education that will make your child’s mind and future blossom, isn’t that worth the risk of trying?

Money Doesn’t Have To Stop You Anymore

If the only problem is money because you can’t afford $8000 a year private schools, then happily there is a great new option for you-Internet private schools. These schools are low-cost and can give your child a fun, quality, and rewarding education. Many of these schools cost less than $850 a year tuition, which is less than $85 a month for a ten-month school year.

While no one can guarantee you success, like anything else in life, if you keep trying, you will probably succeed in giving your child a great education at home. If you say to yourself, “I will make this work, for my child’s sake,” you’ll be surprised at what you can accomplish. Tell yourself what Gene Kranz, actor Ed Harris’s character in the movie Apollo 13, said to his Houston crew about rescuing the astronauts in trouble: “Failure is not an option.” If you say this and mean it, you’re halfway to success for yourself and your child.

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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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Most Public Schools Do Not Offer Quality Education

Because the government runs public schooling, there is simply no incentive to change or excel. First of all, consider the fact that public schools get their students by compulsion. There are compulsory attendance laws, and parents can be arrested if they don’t send their children to public school–even if their children are being bullied and exposed to dangerous influences.

Second, parents have no say in determining what teachers are worth. The incentive for teachers is corrupted because great teachers are not rewarded commensurately and mediocre and poor teachers with tenure simply keep rising on the pay scale without improving. Your taxes still pay these teachers, no matter how poor a job they are doing for your children.

Private education is the exact opposite. Schools and teachers both need to be good in order to stay in the education business. Schools are competing for students, and are constantly working to improve. If you read Public Schools, Public Menace, you will find out more about getting a quality education for your child through internet private schools for less than $950 per year! Whether you home school your child with online assistance or your child benefits from one-on-one instruction from an exceptional teacher, you will find that he or she regains an interest in learning, becomes happier and healthier, and achieves greater success.

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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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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 time the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620 until the 1850s, most parents taught their children to read at home or sent their children to small private or religious grammar schools. Education was voluntary and local governments did not force parents to send their children to state-controlled schools. Yet, literacy rates in colonial America were far higher than they are today.

In 1765, John Adams wrote that “a native of America, especially of New England, who cannot read and write is as rare a Phenomenon as a Comet.” Jacob Duche, the chaplain of Congress in 1772, said of his countrymen, “Almost every man is a reader.” Daniel Webster confirmed that the product of home education was near-universal literacy when he stated, “a youth of fifteen, of either sex, who cannot read and write, is very seldom to be found.”

After the Revolutionary War, literacy rates continued to rise in all the colonies. There were many affordable, innovative local schools parents could send their children to. Literacy data from that early period show that from 1650 to 1795, the literacy rate among white men rose from 60 to 90 percent. Literacy among women went from 30 to 45 percent.

In the early 1800s, Pierre Samuel Dupont, an influential French citizen who helped Thomas Jefferson negotiate for the Louisiana Purchase, came to America and surveyed education here. He found that most young Americans could read, write, and “cipher” (do arithmetic), and that Americans of all ages could and did read the Bible. He estimated that fewer than four Americans in a thousand were unable to write neatly and legibly. [5]

From 1800 to 1840, literacy rates in the North increased from 75 percent to between 91 and 97 percent. In the South, the white literacy rate grew from about 50 to 60 percent, to 81 percent (it was illegal to teach blacks to read). By 1850, literacy rates in Massachusetts and other New England states, for both men and women, was close to 97 percent. This was before Massachusetts created the first compulsory public-school system in America in 1852. (Of course, these literacy numbers did not apply to black slaves since many colonies had laws that forbid teaching slaves to read).

Ever since the first public schools were established in Massachusetts in 1852, and made compulsory in most of the states by the 1890′s, literacy among adults and children has been deteriorating. As I noted in a previous article, today the literacy rate for students in our public schools ranges from 30 percent to 70 percent. Compare that literacy horror statistic to the over 90 percent literacy rate for the average child, man, and woman by 1852.

The question to naturally ask is this: if our kids learned to read far better when we had an education free-market before public schools came along, why on Earth do we need public schools now? The answer is, we don’t. Parents should take advantage of the quality, low-cost, free-market education alternatives they have right now that I explore in my book, “Public Schools, Public Menace.”

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A new study reported that more than 25 percent of Baltimore and Washington, D.C. public-school teachers send their kids to private schools. The study done by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute found that nationwide, public-school teachers are almost twice as likely as other parents to send their children to a private school. The study also found that more than one in five public-school teachers send their kids to private schools.

In the biggest cities across America, the statistics get even more startling. In Washington, D.C., Baltimore, and 16 other big cities, more than 1 out of 4 public-school teacher’s kids attend private schools. In some cities, almost half the public-school teachers do this. For example, in Philadelphia, 44 percent, and in Cincinnati, 41 percent of public-school teachers sent their kids to private schools.

Yet, across America, only about 12.2 percent of all parents who are not teachers send their children to private schools.

Now, why is this? Public school authorities keep telling us that they give our kids a good education. Yet they send their kids to private schools?

Well, teachers know best in this case. They actually work in the public schools every day. They see the kind of 3rd-rate, often mind-numbing education children get in these schools. Public-school teachers love their children like all other parents do. They want the best for their kids. So, is it any wonder that so many teachers send their children to private schools?

These statistics should be a warning signal for parents, a red flag waving briskly in the wind. If your children’s teachers are sending their children to private schools, should you be keeping your kids in public school? If the soldier-teachers in the public-school trenches tell you that there is something very wrong with these schools, you should, for once, be listening to them.

Actions speak louder than words. The fact that so many public-school teachers send their kids to private schools should be all the proof you need that it might be wise for you to look for education alternatives for your kids elsewhere.

If you think you can’t afford an expensive private school, you’re happily mistaken. Joel Turtel’s book, “Public School’s, Public Menace” tells parents all about quality, low-cost Internet private schools. These private schools are a great new resource for giving your children an excellent education at an affordable price.

P.S.:  Like most hypocritical liberals, guess where Barack Obama sends his kids to school — you guessed it – to private schools – actions speak louder than words.

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What Is Real Success in School?

Success in school is not simply measured in knowing the answers to test questions. Public schools require students to memorize and regurgitate information in a variety of essentially useless subjects. A smart parent asks, “What is the point?” This is especially true when two weeks later, your child doesn’t remember any of her test material because she was bored and realized she was never going to use any of this information.

Real success in school is loving learning and becoming a lifelong independent learner. It’s learning to read proficiently–not settling for the pathetic state of sub-literacy with which public schools leave so many students. Success in school is predicated on a less regimented environment in which a child is nurtured and not sucked down to the level of the lowest common denominator.

Additionally, children will not really learn, love school, or achieve success in school if they are afraid and uncomfortable. With the violence in schools, the drug deals taking place in the bathrooms, the bullies that teachers can’t control, and the aggressive presence of unwanted sexual education, children don’t feel safe. Read Public Schools, Public Menace and find the right internet private school for your child for as little as $850 per year. You’ll learn more about the benefits of home schooling and internet private schools and watch your child live up to his potential and achieve success in school!

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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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Public-school defenders often argue that school choice would destroy the public schools. Almost 90 percent of children in this country attend public schools. If we had vouchers, no compulsory attendance laws, and an unregulated education free market, millions of parents might transfer their children to private schools. This would drain hundreds of millions of tax dollars from public schools. Those children left behind in the shriveled public schools would then get an even worse education than they do now. Therefore, the argument goes, we have to fight school choice to protect the public schools.

School authorities use the same argument against charter schools. Charter schools are public schools controlled by parent-teacher boards, not central school authorities. School authorities claim that charter schools, like vouchers, divert millions of taxpayer dollars from regular public schools, and can therefore undermine these schools. Public schools may have serious problems, school authorities say, but almost forty-five million American children attend these schools. Allowing school choice would “threaten” these children’s education.

Public-school apologists argue that, despite these schools’ never-ending failure and betrayal of our children, we should just keep using the same old failed solutions – spend more money, hire more teachers, and reduce class sizes – and hope we get better results (which of course we never will).

Public Schools Hurt Our Children’s Education –– So Why Keep These Schools?

In the meantime, what happens to forty-five million public-school children? In effect, school authorities’ don’t care about what happens to children who are forced to stay – but rather what happens to the public-school system if they are free to leave. By this reasoning, no matter how bad the schools get, we must not help children leave because that might make the public schools worse. That is like asking a parent to stop her child from escaping from a prison because doing so would upset the warden.

The question therefore is, do our children exist to serve the public-school system or should our education system exist to serve our children?

It seems that school authorities and public-school employees would rather protect an irreparably broken, failed system, than risk the security of their jobs by giving parents real school choice. We can certainly understand public-school employees wanting to keep their guaranteed job security. However, should we sacrifice our children’s education and future to keep failed public schools in business?

The argument that vouchers, charter schools, and other school-choice alternatives might destroy the public schools is one of the best arguments for school choice. Government-controlled public schools, not school choice, can cripple our children’s education and banish millions of inner-city kids to a lifetime of poverty and ignorance. We need to scrap the public school system, once and for all, and the sooner the better.

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One reason public schools get away with educational murder, year after year, is because local governments violate parents’ liberty and parental rights with impunity. Local governments don’t own or run food stores, auto showrooms, office-supply stores, or pre-schools and private colleges in America. Yet they own the public schools and control 1st through 12th grade education in America.

Should idiot bureaucrats dictate how we educate our children?

Do government officials have any right to dictate how we should educate our children? To answer this question, we have to examine what our Founding Fathers understood to be the real function of government. In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson clearly stated the moral nature and purpose of government:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness-that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. . . .”

The Declaration of Independence affirms that we have natural rights as human beings to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” It establishes the principle that we, the people, acting individually and by free consent, created our government only to protect and secure our natural rights as human beings. That is government’s sole legitimate function.

Look again at the phrase from the Declaration that says, “governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” The “governed” means all the people, not just some, not a minority, and not a majority. It means that all citizens, including parents, have the same inalienable rights.

Is government your master or agent?

That phrase also means that government is our agent, not our master. It means that we, as free human beings, voluntarily grant limited powers to government for a specific purpose, to protect our natural rights. It means that government should only have those powers we specifically grant to it for that purpose. Yet, nowhere in the Constitution is the word “education” mentioned. The Constitution did not give the federal government any right or power to control how parents educate their children. By implication, state governments do not have any such right or power either, because such a power would violate our fundamental liberties.

Nature and justice confirm that parents have the right to decide who educates their children. Like parents of all species, most human parents protect and nurture their children and teach them the skills and knowledge they need to survive. Parents in all cultures make teaching their children a first priority. Since reading, writing, and arithmetic are skills needed to prosper in a modern society, it stands to reason that most parents will find a way to teach these skills to their children if the means are available.

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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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If licensing doesn’t work, what is the alternative? The answer is, no licensing. If anyone could teach without a license, like home-schooling parents or private-school teachers, then millions of new, competent, creative teachers would flood the market. These new, unlicensed teachers would compete with one another and drive the price of education down, much as competition drives down the price of computers. They would, thankfully, also put public schools out of business, since millions of parents and free-market schools would now hire these new competent, low-cost teachers.

Without licensing laws, anyone with a special skill or knowledge could simply put an ad in the Yellow Pages or their local newspaper and advertise themselves as a tutor in English, math, biology, history, or computer skills. Retired cooks, engineers, authors, plumbers, musicians, biologists, or businessmen who love teaching could easily open a small school in their homes. If there were no license laws, these talented new teachers would not have to worry about school authorities stopping them from teaching because they didn’t have a license.

How would parents be sure they were not hiring a charlatan if there were no licensing laws? The same way they judge their doctor, accountant, or car-mechanic-by results, reputation, and by being careful consumers. Naturally, parents would make occasional mistakes in judgment because they are human. However, they would quickly become careful consumers because they would now be spending their hard-earned money for teachers. It is amazing how fast we learn to judge the work of others when we have to pay for their services. Also, if a parent does make mistakes in judging an unlicensed teacher, by watching her child’s progress she will soon catch her error. At that point, she can quickly fire the teacher or school and find a better one. Can a parent do that with her children’s public-school teacher or school?

The worst nightmare for public-school authorities is a true free market of teachers with no licensing requirements. Fierce competition by millions of new, unlicensed, competent, highly-skilled people, might put public schools out of business and threaten teachers’ tenured jobs. That is one unspoken reason why school authorities fiercely defend licensing laws — real competition terrifies them. That is also one of the best reasons to eliminate teacher licensing.

The only way to insure good teachers is to let parents decide who will teach their children, not bureaucrats. Millions of parents making individual decisions about who should teach their children, will bring forth the best teachers. Fierce competition and an education free market would raise all boats in the teaching profession. Teachers who want to succeed in their profession would have to prove to parent-customers or private-school owners that they have what it takes. They would have to prove by results that they know how to teach and motivate children to read, write, and learn.

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