<p>This is SO true. The public schools in our town are, by and large, excellent. My D1 certainly got a better education (by far) at her public school than I did at a private school way back when. My D2, who is a completely different student, is using far more school resources yet not getting near the education D1 did. That’s not the school’s fault, though. They’re different students on different tracks with different motivations.</p>
<p>95% of the students at our public high school go on to college, and the vast majority of those are well prepared. I’ve known many kids who came back from their first year of college and reported that their AP and honors high school classes were more challenging than their college classes.</p>
<p>Um, yeah. Bill Gates attended the best private schools in Seattle. No way could I afford $20K and up per year for each child of mine to attend the same. I live in the school district just North of where he grew up. Our district is excellent overall, but I can attest that some of the schools are better than others and even within the excellent schools some classes are wonderful and some are absolutely abysmal. (I have stories about AP English.) </p>
<p>This great country of ours, unlike every other country, promises to educate everyone. All abilities, all disabilities. We don’t have a defined two-tiered system of vocational vs. college prep, probably to our detriment, but that’s how it is.
I don’t personally think that education is any worse than it was 40 years ago, just that the below-average intelligence person who could skate by with an 8th grade education and still make a living in a blue-collar manufacturing job is still in the school working at their ability/level or is a drop out with few prospects as that mfg job no longer exists.</p>
<p>The private school I attended was so bad by the time I reached middle school that I didn’t entertain any notion of my daughters attending that same school when they started kindergarten. The public school was above and beyond what the private could have provided.</p>
<p>Like another poster said, it’s everyone else’s school that’s awful.</p>
<p>“This great country of ours, unlike every other country, promises to educate everyone”
-Promise has been broken…not educating everyone by far using any kind of very low standards of measure, not even close…other countries are actually doing it without any kind of promise, they just do because they do not believe in self-estime developed thru lowering standards, they believe in self-estime developed thru achievement, overcoming great challenges and which one you prefer to see in your kids? Where foreign exchange students are placed? One would assume in the lower grades becuase of insufficient English. Nope, they are placed forward, in higher level classes than their age.</p>
<p>Where we live, it’s the people who are sending their kids to the (reeaallyy expensive) private schools who are the biggest bashers of the public schools, which are some of the best in our region. I honestly think they have to believe the public schools are awful in order to justify spending 25k a year on kindergarten. I think HS is 50k a year. </p>
<p>When my son was a preschooler, we moved to this suburb just for the public schools. That’s what everyone does in this country if you can afford to. You have to find the handful of decent public schools that are out there, and yes, the housing is much more expensive. That’s just the reality of it.</p>
<p>This is very true. In our local public HS, the kids on the IB track are off to Stanford, Carleton, Grinnell, Bowdoin, Wisconsin, and the Honors College at the University of Minnesota. These kids are college-ready, up and down the line. Some of the kids on the “regular” track can barely read, a large fraction of them dropped out somewhere along the way, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them are in prison or dead already. Others are doing well enough to go to college–probably community college or a lower-tier public institution than our flagship-- but perhaps with questionable skills. So is the school doing well or not? Well, it’s doing well for some and very poorly for others.</p>
<p>We have done both public and private and in several states. My kids went k-2 at an amazing public school. Moved to a different state for third grade. Moved to the district that had the “best” elementary school. It was AWFUL. My kids were the only ones in their class reading above grade level. They went from loving school to hating it that year. We decided to put them in a private school where they went till eighth grade. Wonderful but expensive. Moved to yet another state for the high school years. Moved into one of the highest rated districts in the state. What do we think? It’s just ok… Not great, not awful, just meh. The sad part about our experience is that my kids both have vowed to not have kids until/if they can afford a private school education for their offspring. They have had some good teachers in HS, but the basic classes are for idiots. There is no way a student can take “regular” classes and be prepared for anything other than matriculation to working at McDonalds. NCLB has ruined the public school system.</p>
Given the abnormally high percentage of parents on CC who are full pay at extremely expensive private schools and/or who have graduate degrees, I’d wager most (if not nearly all) of CC is in that content 5%. Moan as they might about the plight of the oppressed “middle” class, few are products - or have kids who are products - of genuinely poor or bad public schools.</p>
<p>The other day while going through my elementary school report cards (from the 50’s) that for some reason my parents had saved, I was reading what I was expected to do and know in kindergarten. It was astonishing the differences between what I had to know (from a top school district) to what kids today in the same grade from an inner city poor school district learn in the same grade.</p>
<p>Polls about the state of our education will vary tremendously depending on many come from schools where the first statement is nothing but a cynical and hollow promise, or from one of the suburban Shangri-Las where people (who can afford it) actively made sure to leave the urban and separate the chaff from the wheat. </p>
<p>The happiness of parents regarding THEIR schools is probably directly related to how well this academic and economic separation did succeed. Feel free to add the segregation and race in that equation. </p>
<p>Our public system of education PRETENDS to educate everyone. The reality is that it only educates the ones that are easy to educate. The rest is simply the statistical casualties that are buried or grossly misrepresented. </p>
<p>Yep, there is an America with 60,000,000 football temples (a la Allen, Texas) and there is quite another in Detroit, or … in the urban wastelands of Dallas or Houston.</p>
<p>I’ve been on forums where parents state that they are going to homeschool and then state their situation and I think that’s it is a disaster of a situation. But they think that they have to because of safety issues in their local public school.</p>
<p>Single, minority, low-income parent in a city that you know is bad. My thoughts are: how can you possibly homeschool? Not what I’d write in a homeschooling forum though.</p>
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<p>Columbine. You don’t have to be paranoid for the school to actually be dangerous.</p>
<p>I get a little tired of the assumption that all it takes is more money to make a school function at its best. Our public HS is okay, in a “nice” suburb, where most people are middle class and work hard at fulltime jobs. We middle class folk somehow found the time to participate in school fundraisers, sporting events, etc. We stepped up and volunteered. Things got done, money was raised. The new crop of kids, dare I say it, are from a different socio-ethnic group, and guess what, the parents simply do not volunteer. The programs are starting to fall apart, the school is suffering, and next thing you know, in 5 or 10 years the parents will be complaining that it isn’t fair that their “poor” school does so badly. It’s not rocket science!</p>
<p>My older 2 attend our local suburban high school, my youngest rides a bus to attend a magnet school in the nearby city. I send her there because it is a good fit for her - a better fit than the local elementary school. So many families in the city schools are poor, that they have universal free lunch. Many of the parents don’t speak english. I’ve had parents ask how I could send her there, but I have no reservations. Every student, whether local, or from one of the suburbs, is in that school because the parents apllied to the magnet lottery. No matter what support they can provide for their children, they made a proactive decision to enroll at this school. They don’t have the best test scores, but the kids are learning, and improving every year. Even the poorest schools can do well if we don’t give up on them, and use money wisely instead of just throwing money at the problems. If the kids aren’t reading, perhaps it’s because the parents don’t read. Perhaps a small amount of money used to teach the parents to read will result in bigger gains than a larger amount of money spent on special programs for the kids - because the kids won’t get the support at home if the parents don’t read!</p>
<p>Perhaps that poor single parent in the city would be better of volunteering in the school, instead of spending the same amount of time teaching her child herself, particularly when she has no clue how or what to teach her child.</p>
<p>Fwiw, parent involvement at my k-8 school was very, very high (almost all mothers were SAHMs who were WAYY too involved with their kids’ lives IMO). Only about half of my graduating 8th grade class eventually went on to college.</p>
<p>If you have a bright kid, a computer, and about $600, it’s surprisingly easy to homeschool and achieve great results. There is so much free stuff on the internet. I homeschooled my DS for a couple of years and when he returned to school, the teachers were all amazed by how much he knew and how far above grade level he was. We typically spent no more than two to three hours a day under formal instruction which left DS with lots of free time to explore things that interested him. Most of the work was self-guided–I only needed to be in the room to keep him on task. I imagine as kids get older, they can almost completely take over their education and it’s a great preparation for college. The key to homeschooling is to emphasize learning (a lot of homeschoolers are doing it for other reasons).</p>
<p>Yes. I’m supporting BCEagle on this, even though I know for a fact that many if not most parents choosing the homeschool option are ill-prepared to manage it. However, many (in choosing the option) are doing a number of things which are legitimate: (1) protecting their children from a whole array of negative cultural aspects – not only violence, but more (slacking, precocious sexual acting-out, excessive emphasis on socializing in high school, etc.) (2) exercising greater control over the direction of the curriculum (3) keeping a closer eye on the peril of indifference to schooling (4) shaping the style or approach to an academically at-risk student who is falling through the public school cracks, etc.</p>