“… Not only do we consign three-quarters to the junk heap right off the bat because their teacher/parent is a dolt, we consign most of the rest to it in most subjects because the teacher/parent doesn’t know it all.”

That number is made up. Home schooling failures are way south of 10% (depending on the study). No matter how measured, home schoolers always outperform public school students.

“Home schooling … it’s not a solution for low academic levels and crappy teachers.”

Anyone with a brain can teach early reading and mathematics through long division. The success or failure of schooling beyond that point is almost always based on the motivation of the child *to teach himself*, aided by the parents as needed. Guess what, “real” teachers don’t know it all either. The advantage that many home school parents have is that they understand this.

A parent cannot hope to match a truly excellent teacher. A parent can, and often does, exceed anything else.

“… but friends married to teachers tell me that they have to do a lot of remedial work with failed home-schooling experiments – kids who can’t read at age ten and so forth.”

The percentage of public school high school graduates that cannot read (upwards of 30% in some years and places) is orders of magnitude above the home school failure rate. Anecdotes are not data.

That said, one of the things that home schoolers around here hammer repeatedly is that it’s important to know when to quit. Home schooling *usually* becomes more difficult the older the child gets. Many people can’t hack it past 9th grade, where specialization of teaching does become an issue. Others find difficult the middle school shift from the basics to a more expanded curriculum. The older the child, the more he has to do himself, with less return. Obviously, no one home schools college.

Finally, there are plenty of people that should *not* homeschool. It requires a lot of work and discipline.

“If we’re going to keep on home schooling, we have to test kids to make sure they’re learning and not just memorizing Bible verses or passages from the Koran.”

There may be an exception somewhere, but every State I know anything about requires testing. Sometimes home schoolers get considerably more testing than public school kids. Sometimes they get the same.

“There’s a fine line between a home school and a Madraasa, and I’d rather not get too close to it.”

This is just stupid, ignorant, and insulting. I’m sure that out of the 1,000,000+ home school kids, there are niche cases that walk up to and past the Madrassa line. I can find you some public schools that are drug dens or sports factories. Anecdotes are not data.

That is the insanity of our immigration policy. We allow millions of immigrants in every year but somehow anyone who suggests that we should be selective and picky about who we give citizenship to is called a racist. I’m am not talking about rich vs poor.I am not talking about skin color. Some of our greatest success stories with recent immigrants are people of color. I am talking about the vast number of hard working immigrants who want to come here to become Americans, not just pit stop semi-citizens.

We will always get a large percentage of our immigrants from the poor South and Central American countries. And that is natural. Most of them want to work. But the thought that we can have open borders with no sense of control or selection is absurd.

In my younger days I took a college Chemistry class with 6 Vietnamese refugee’s who grasp of English was extremely limited. They all got A’s and if they spoke English or if I spoke Vietnamese I could have used them as tutors. That kind of energy and determination would be a blessing for this country. But there has to be some sort of control. Both parties are ignoring this huge problem that could be turned into a huge asset with some common sense.

Yes, I support vouchers. Agree completely that the public school monopoly is a large part of the problem, given the endemic corruption in big cities (where the schools are the juiciest patronage/slush plum going) and the tendency of our current “educationist” mindset toward absurd expenditures on non teaching-related salaries and other items.

However, as Richard pointed out, parents are a huge part of the problem. To put it more precisely, the culture of the home is the msot important determinant of the child’s educational performance, and the cultural status of most American homes is abysmal. I’d wager that most American homes contain more porn videos than books that have actually been read. Even in supposedly elite homes you find as many TV sets as bookshelves.

Vouchers won’t make more than an incremental difference here. Only when this country replaces the culture of the Big Shtoopid with the culture of learning, when the role model ceases to be JayZ and Britney and becomes what the Russians call the intelligent, or man of science and culture, will we see any fundamental improvement.

My solution? Lift all curbs (aside from normal security ones) on immigrants with an advanced technical or science degree. Bring in a million families of fiercely pro-learning scientists, engineers, technicians, doctors etc from all over the world.

Parents who don’t care are a huge problem, as well as those who sue at the drop of a hat. To add to your comment on the politicized nature of California schools you can add the text book process, which has become a huge business, and when you mix money and politicians quality usually suffers.

The good teachers are frustrated and the poor ones stay in the system too long. There is no simple solution but I think if contol is shifted from Sacramento and D.C. back to the local districts you will start to see more parental involvement. There is no excuse for parents who ignore their kids education. But with the extensive regulations from Sacramento the principles are limited in their options to handle problems. Some parents just don’t care. Some are tired of being ignored and being told there is nothing that can be changed. Those are the ones who often try Home Schooling.

Some parents in California are using novel ways to get around the equal money per student state spending regulations. They are forming not for profit corporations that raise money to replace the programs that have been cut. It is legal but not quite following the spirit of the law, a law that was suppossed to insure that all schools were equal but did not achieve the desired results. Suprise, Suprise.

Perhaps when kids who do not make progress will start failing instead being promoted to the next grade things will improve?

I still think, like many other posters here, that public funding of schools ñ at least the way that it is structured now – is stifling any meaningful reform. And you are right; it will take an effort on everybodyís part to bring about the change. But all I hear today is: give me more money.

From what I’ve seen, teachers are not the largest part of the problem, and not all of the demands of their union are unjustified. In Texas, where teachers don’t have collective bargaining rights, teachers and underpaid and schools suck. In California, where they do have collective bargaining, teachers are overpaid and schools suck. So I don’t think the sucking nature of public schools is on account of strong unions.

Curriculum is highly politicized now. In CA, they a state Education Code that’s thousands of pages long, passed by the legislature like any other law and binding on districts. There’s a lot of crap in this code, but it’s the law and they have to follow it.

But the biggest problem, in my experience, is parents, who are either disinterested in the whole thing or overly obsessed with making sure nobody is mean to little Chauncey. Until we get a better class of parents, schools are going to continue sucking.

The co-op school idea is a perfect example of parents taking control of their kids education. There is a growing co-operative trend within the homeschool movement.

When the public schools reform themselves the homeschool movement will shrink.I believe most states require testing for their home school students so the worry about “Madrassa’s” is more about a particular outlook on life rather then a actual problem.

The market will eventually eliminate or promote the home school movement. If the test results and the college entrance statistics are worse then the public school results it will die out. If they are equal or better it will grow.I don’t see home schooling as the ideal. Good public schools will almost always be the better solution. I see it as a reaction to a major problem that isn’t being handled.

You describe very good solution (the coop) to the problem that public schools become.

But apart from breaking Teacherís Union a la Regan I do not see how this could happen on a large scale. In meantime, people who want decent education for their kids will either try the home schooling or will spend a fortune on private schools.

I simply do not see enough public will for some radical solution that may actually work. I only see demands for more taxpayers money.

Oh Richard, fine comment up until the end. You just can’t help yourself, can you.