Conversation
Notices
-
For the record, I don't believe the U.S. public school system is a drain on society. I believe it significantly underperforms its potential, but I also believe that in a world of single parenthood and two-job families, substantially all alternatives rely on its existence. I also believe that our public schools are too tightly managed from the national and state capitals, rather than locally.
And what does some pointy-headed educrat in Washington DC know about the needs of students in a much less urban part of SoCal? Nothing! But because of top-down rules, the local school districts cannot respond to local needs even if they wanted to (hint: they don't want to respond to local needs; they just want to pass the next district and campus administration staff pay raises).
#sonOne graduated from a public high school that was also a continuation school. He had gone there for the continuation program after repeated fights and a couple of medical issues in the main public high school, but once he caught up, he transferred to the regular high school program. (I knew the school wasn't responsive to medical issues, because I had a friend [now deceased] who had attended there while dealing with a life-threatening condition which eventually took his life.)
#sonTwo graduated from a charter school that is funded with public dollars. He also attended a medical home school program through the same continuation school that his older brother attended, but as soon as he recovered, he wanted out because that school had too much homework. Two of his elementary school friends moved out of state partly because of the poor quality of the public middle school he attended.
I remember one time, while he was on home schooling, we went to a local McDonald's for the day. We had breakfast and lunch there, while he did his schoolwork. There was a lady doing the same thing with her little boy. The toilets weren't all that clean, so when I needed to go, I left my kid there with the lady (and a long-time employee whom I knew) watching him, while I went to a nearby store. Later on, the lady needed to go, and I watched her kid while she went to the store. (That McD's now has a sign saying that their dining room is for up to 30 minutes use only.)
#Daddy_A graduated from a different charter school that is partially funded with public dollars. He went there after his public middle school experienced several race-related fights that spread from a nearby public high school.
Despite the public schools failing all three of them, the alternatives they used existed because we have public funding for schools. In each case, for different reasons, completely home schooling the child was not a realistic alternative, nor was getting into one of the area's paid and privately funded church schools. Even so, I did know a woman who was able to get grants and part-time on-campus work to send her three sons to a church school instead of the public middle school after her oldest got mononucleosis and the school demanded that he return to campus despite not having recovered.