David: I appreciate your passion, but this is NOT a "public schools" matter! Please re-read #3 above, where it says: "The SBOE is key as it determines the subject standards, approves textbooks, and oversees statewide exams — for all K-12 courses and for ALL K-12 students (public, private, and home-schooled)."
David: I appreciate your passion, but this is NOT a "public schools" matter! Please re-read #3 above, where it says: "The SBOE is key as it determines the subject standards, approves textbooks, and oversees statewide exams — for all K-12 courses and for ALL K-12 students (public, private, and home-schooled)."
In other words, the exact same problems would exist if there were zero public schools. Please refocus your interest on the real problem.
But thank you for this article; you've inspired me to collect a bunch of notes that I've been posting for years, and to consolidate them into an article, which I am writing as we are posting here. "Conservative" parents don't seem to understand that by voting for more state funding of their schools (in a misguided attempt to pawn off the expense of their kids' educations onto someone else), they've also handed all authority to the state and federal governments, and therefore have lost control. Parents don't like it when I point out that they have no right to expect control of their local schools when they, both as individuals and as a district , provide the minority of those schools' funding. My article will hopefully help hit them over the head with this reality.
Unfortunately the public schools are still the source of the problem and we're not going to fix them. The power of your state legislators derives from your public schools' unions, which are easily the most powerful political forces in most states. Until we take the wheels off their bus, there will be no relief. We cannot fix the legislature any more than we can fix the public schools and their unions. The vast majority of conservatives still send their kids to public schools, and there are LOTS of us. If we would only do the same to them that we've done to Annheuser-Busch, you might start seeing some changes. But until then, we're sticking our fingers in a dike that was already broken decades ago.
David: I'm not a current public schools advocate — but I do believe that they can be fixed. Until you read an understand my prior reply (above), most of your energy is being wasted in the wrong direction.
Well if you have some time please read about my odyssey with the public schools and see if, afterwards, I haven't changed your mind: http://mychildwillread.org/the-problem.shtml
OK, I did read it — and will include it in my next Newsletter. To me the most important section is "WHO MAKES CURRICULUM DECISIONS?" I didn't really see the correct answer, which is "Your State Board of Education" — and that applies to ALL schools, pubic and private.
Thanks for taking the time. Sure, your state board of education makes the decisions, but who is on the state board? A more local analogy is to believe that your school board controls your local district. Right, but who is on the school board? Mostly, school boards are filled with union- and administration- selected toadies who easily win low-turnout elections where preoccupied parents have other things to do besides show up to vote for something whose significance they do not understand. Curriculum publishers have far more incentive and money than you do to control who is on the state board, and if the public can convince the board to do something the publishers don't like, their solution is to replace board members until the "correct" decisions are being made. The point of my diatribe is this: almost 70 years ago the public was massively awakened to the travesty in public school reading instruction. The term "Why Johnny Can't Read" is widely known, but today almost nobody knows its significance; in my talks I haven't found a single person yet, including people my age and older, who knows that it's the title of a book, much less that the book sold millions of copies. Nobody has fixed this thing in all that time, despite relatively simple solutions having been widely known all along. I think it's wildly presumptious to believe that we're going to fix it now.
David: I appreciate your passion, but this is NOT a "public schools" matter! Please re-read #3 above, where it says: "The SBOE is key as it determines the subject standards, approves textbooks, and oversees statewide exams — for all K-12 courses and for ALL K-12 students (public, private, and home-schooled)."
In other words, the exact same problems would exist if there were zero public schools. Please refocus your interest on the real problem.
But thank you for this article; you've inspired me to collect a bunch of notes that I've been posting for years, and to consolidate them into an article, which I am writing as we are posting here. "Conservative" parents don't seem to understand that by voting for more state funding of their schools (in a misguided attempt to pawn off the expense of their kids' educations onto someone else), they've also handed all authority to the state and federal governments, and therefore have lost control. Parents don't like it when I point out that they have no right to expect control of their local schools when they, both as individuals and as a district , provide the minority of those schools' funding. My article will hopefully help hit them over the head with this reality.
Unfortunately the public schools are still the source of the problem and we're not going to fix them. The power of your state legislators derives from your public schools' unions, which are easily the most powerful political forces in most states. Until we take the wheels off their bus, there will be no relief. We cannot fix the legislature any more than we can fix the public schools and their unions. The vast majority of conservatives still send their kids to public schools, and there are LOTS of us. If we would only do the same to them that we've done to Annheuser-Busch, you might start seeing some changes. But until then, we're sticking our fingers in a dike that was already broken decades ago.
David: I'm not a current public schools advocate — but I do believe that they can be fixed. Until you read an understand my prior reply (above), most of your energy is being wasted in the wrong direction.
Well if you have some time please read about my odyssey with the public schools and see if, afterwards, I haven't changed your mind: http://mychildwillread.org/the-problem.shtml
OK, I did read it — and will include it in my next Newsletter. To me the most important section is "WHO MAKES CURRICULUM DECISIONS?" I didn't really see the correct answer, which is "Your State Board of Education" — and that applies to ALL schools, pubic and private.
Thanks for taking the time. Sure, your state board of education makes the decisions, but who is on the state board? A more local analogy is to believe that your school board controls your local district. Right, but who is on the school board? Mostly, school boards are filled with union- and administration- selected toadies who easily win low-turnout elections where preoccupied parents have other things to do besides show up to vote for something whose significance they do not understand. Curriculum publishers have far more incentive and money than you do to control who is on the state board, and if the public can convince the board to do something the publishers don't like, their solution is to replace board members until the "correct" decisions are being made. The point of my diatribe is this: almost 70 years ago the public was massively awakened to the travesty in public school reading instruction. The term "Why Johnny Can't Read" is widely known, but today almost nobody knows its significance; in my talks I haven't found a single person yet, including people my age and older, who knows that it's the title of a book, much less that the book sold millions of copies. Nobody has fixed this thing in all that time, despite relatively simple solutions having been widely known all along. I think it's wildly presumptious to believe that we're going to fix it now.
David: The State Board of Education peope are either appointed by the Gov, or directly elected. In NC only four out of 17 are Conservatives — yet that was enough to get a MAJOR win <https://criticallythinking.substack.com/p/education-game-changer>.