The system is broken and it's hurting our kids.
John Stossel, probably my favorite true journalist (in contrast to the ideologues and propagandists who call themselves journalists), has a great little article explaining why American schools don't work. It's really quite simple. Read it here.
The tv version of the report will be on ABC this Friday night (1/13).
2 comments:
I don't completely disagree with the article however, I feel their are a lot of wholes in the argument. If you want your kids to have a good education and you live in a area within a bad school zone.....MOVE. or send them to a private school. You will say it is expensive but, is anything more important then education?? You will say that you then should home school your children and if you have the time and the education level to do that then go right ahead. Yet, there are definitely a lot of great qualities you learn for a school sytem(private or public) that you cannot receive in an homeschooled enviroment.
My biggest beef with the article is maybe if we compensated teachers in the public school system what they are worth we could get some quality teachers into the system. I am sure the teachers that are in Europe that over see the children that scored higher then the American children are very well educated and they may have even attended one of the eight universities that were mentioned in the article. And, I bet that those professors are compensated highly for their work. It just boils down to if we want to stop the problems in the public school system then quit complaining and send your kids to a private school... it's not expensive if you are smart enough to plan when they are still young.
This presumes that the problem with public schools is just poor teaching. That may be a problem sometimes, but most of the public school teachers I know are intelligent enough to get the job done (remember that intelligence and education are not always related). But there are other complicating factors that impede public schools (administrative, cultural, philisophical, etc.).
As I become more informed about home school options I realized that many of my understandings were ill-informed. The pros and cons and especially the results were surprising.
One of these days I'll blog about it. Maybe soon, mayber later.
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