With the govenment wasting oney and refusing to save or invest is it really any wonder that americans do the same?

Both of my girls could read at a 2nd grade level before they were enrolled in kindergarten. Most of the kids in their classes could, too. But then again, we don't live in an inner city environment, and my parents, their father, and I actually took the time to read to them when they were very small and to teach them their letters and numbers at home. Admittedly, a lot of kids don't get that kind of attention, but throwing money at the problem doesn't automatically solve it.

A friend of mine, an 8th grade teacher, hates the 'No Child Left Behind' program and complains often that she has to spend more time testing than teaching. I suggested getting the federal government out of education altogether and letting the state be the highest level of government involvement. She was horrified and aghast - she said there are all these poor kids whose parents couldn't afford to send them to private school, and we'd have all these illiterates running around, panic panic, wail, moan, gnash teeth, etc.

(Well first of all, what do we have NOW but a bunch of illiterates running around? But I didn't say that.)

I explained it to her this way - stop confusing paying for education with running it. People who can't afford to buy food get food stamps, but that doesn't mean the government runs the grocery stores. There is no reason education couldn't work the same way - let the much more powerful, effective, and efficient private market forces run the schools, and let the government provide the equivalent of food stamps to those who can't afford it.

(I think people who can't afford to educate their kids should stop having them, but it doesn't really do any good to say this.)

If free markets could do for education what they've done for electronics and available food selection, we'd see some improvement in a hurry. There MUST be something we can do about the national teachers union. It is the biggest barrier to any sort of progress.

I think a lot of the problem out here in Cali is that so many of the teachers are not really up to the material they are teaching. When my nephew did poorly on a writing test, his teacher sent home a note to his mother saying he needed to learn to write like "like a forth grader." I couldn't agree more about the stupid spending. W has proven to be more liberal in the worst ways when it comes to blowing taxpayer dollars. If that's what he meant by 'compassionate conservatism' he can chuck it. I don't see any light at the end of the tunnel either. Any one of the three stooges running now has the potential to be three times as bad as W.

Great post Pirate Jo. Couldn't agree more. I would add that privatising education to some extent may help take care of one of the biggest problems they have in school today, lack of discipline. These kids are virtually told today that they can do anything they damn well please and nobody can lay a hand on them. When you do that, some kids are just going to raise hell and disrupt the whole class, which is common. If you had a strong private school system and you're kid couldn't get into the better schools with a bad behaviour record, it would give parents the motivation to make sure their kids are well-behaved in school if they wanted to get them into the best schools. Competition works!

If that's what he meant by 'compassionate conservatism' he can chuck it.

I don't see any compassion (not that that's what I want from government) and I certainly don't see any conservatism, of the "classically liberal" variety, which is the kind I'm interested in -- not the religious nutterism variety, which I don't think belongs in government; not my kind of government, anyway.

Freedom for religion for you...all for it. But freedom from religion for me, thanks. And from big government idiocy -- and programs that are really just welfare for rich people.

"If you had a strong private school system and you're kid couldn't get into the better schools with a bad behaviour record, it would give parents the motivation to make sure their kids are well-behaved in school if they wanted to get them into the best schools."

Well here's a question for you (just to play Devil's advocte) - what about the parents who don't give a crap? Under our private market scenario, their hooligans would be kept out of the good schools. I have no problem with this, because under no circumstances should their discipline problem kids be allowed to ruin it for everyone else.

But what DO you do with these kids? The answer may be an unfortunate "nothing." You might just have to accept that until negligent people stop having kids, we are always going to have an underemployed and/or criminal class. Doesn't mean we (as taxpayers) can't offer them something to help educate their kids, if they choose to take advantage of it, but we can't force people to teach their kids to care about education if they themselves don't care. I would love to see this change, but sticking a bunch of misbegotten yard apes into classrooms with motivated students has not proven beneficial to anyone.

"If you had a strong private school system and you're kid couldn't get into the better schools with a bad behaviour record, it would give parents the motivation to make sure their kids are well-behaved in school if they wanted to get them into the best schools." All for it in principle I'm a bit shaky on the implementation. I'd be more worried that politicking would have a greater effect on where a kid went to school than behavior or performance. Your parents clashing with the principle cause she's a self loving bitch will get you stuck in the class room with the "misbegotten yard apes" especially if there is one specific teacher that dislikes your attitude (not behavior just attitude).

This will have little effect on me as when we do have a kid we are going to be very involved. Also with the public school system the way it is in most areas we are most likely going with private. Already started up a special savings account and there are still at least 5 year (I hope) before we actually have one.

Vlad, I think competition itself would weed out the "self loving bitch" principals - chances are, if your good student was kept out of school because of politics, your student wouldn't be the only one. And you'd have plenty of other equally good options.

Competition would also address Bikerken's complaint about teachers who can't write at the "forth grade level." You wouldn't take your car to a mechanic who couldn't perform his job, and you wouldn't spend money to send your kid to a school staffed by dolts, either.

Again, the teachers unions are an obstacle. I'm not necessarily anti-union. I don't see anything wrong with employees making use of collective bargaining. But unions would serve their members a lot better if they worked more like a trade association and focused on superior quality. Instead they focus on making their members dismissal-proof.

If kids in India and China are getting better educations than kids here, let the teachers unions go the way of the manufacturing unions. Say screw these self-entitled, overpaid idiots and find non-union teachers from India and China who can do a better job.

PJ -

Vlad, I think competition itself would weed out the "self loving bitch" principals - chances are, if your good student was kept out of school because of politics, your student wouldn't be the only one. And you'd have plenty of other equally good options.

Which is a fine notion in towns that have large enough populations. But what about towns that don't have very large populations? They may be lucky to have more than one option at all, much less more than a good school and a shit school.

The other problem with this theory, is the assumption that any good school is going to want kids that actually have some behavior/learning problems. So what, should all the kids who are really bright, but also have ADHD have to go to school with the thugs? What about dyslexic kids or bipolar kids? Because I promise you, there are a very, very few private schools in this country that will take kids with these kind of problems. The ones that will are schools that specialize in it and they cost even more because of it.

I support fixing and maintaining our public schools. I also support the notion of sliding scale tuition, on the idea that we're going to want to own our kids educations if we actually have to pay for it. There are a lot of things wrong with public education in the U.S., but it is well worth attempting to fix it rather than just doing away with it altogether.

Quite honestly the idea of a privatizing primary education is just about as ugly an idea as I can imagine. As it stands public schools have their very serious problems. But the fact of the matter is, that even at the very worse schools, some of the kids come out of it with a decent education they can go someplace with. Privatization means that a lot of those kids wouldn't have the chance. The lowest common denominator in public schools, is worlds above what the lowest common denominator would be with it privatized. If you actually believe otherwise, I have some real estate in the lost city of Atlantis to sell you.

Say screw these self-entitled, overpaid idiots and find non-union teachers from India and China who can do a better job.

How about you strike out at the people that are actually responsible for the state of our public schools, the fucking policy makers. Teachers are limited by the people telling them what to do. Most of them are reasonable, decent people that would love to teach more effectively. That they do not have that option is not their fault. It's the fault of their school board, their state board of education and even the fucking white house.

All of this is rather elementary to me. After an abysmal first semester of kindergarten at a charter school, we are homeschooling the six year old, through an online public school. It flat wasn't working at the charter school and his default public school location is a nightmare that had less to offer a child with ADHD than my school did. Now he can go at his pace and take a break when he wants to (or when it's bedtime). He is not forced to switch tasks, though we occasionally will limit the time if he is neglecting other school work.

So my interest in public schools is really just my drive to contribute to changing them. I think that people have this reticence about making sweeping changes to the dominant paradigm in public education, because it's just too important to experiment with. So instead of actually making changes that we obviously need to make, we just wring our hands and whine about how bad our schools are.

In that vein, I am starting school this fall (yeah me) and will be studying psych and education. Goal being to work my way in the system and hopefully one day be in a position to actually foment real change. It is sickening to me, that my son has less available to him through school, than I had when I was in school. He is an incredibly bright kid (during one of our recent homeschool, multi-family learning sessions, he was listing the formation type of a series of pictures of mountains. It was at least three months ago that we read the book on plate tectonics he got that from) and I am not going to watch him drop out the same way that I did. A public education system that can't manage to deal with him, with kids who are just exceptional without so much baggage, with kids who are average and with kids who are below average, is broken. I'd say broken to the point that it needs a total overhaul. That doesn't mean we should just throw it all away and give up on the idea that all kids should get an reasonable education.