Since the post is no longer available for interaction

but I just found it now, and had written down a few quick ideas:



You know, this is a great conversation and I'm being exposed to things outside my general bubble (which is wonderful - being a stay-at-home-mome I don't have many conversations like this at the moment) but I have to take issue with your answer to #4, Michael. My mother is a teacher in a private religious school, so the pay scale isn't the same as public schools in our area. (She has been teaching 20 years there, and I think she makes about as much as a starting teacher in the county, I'm not sure.) But the pay isn't what I'm arguing about - although I have to say, I DO think teachers are underpaid; to have the money for school systems coming from property taxes insures an unequal system that is dysfunctional in many ways)

Wait, I'm getting off what I wanted to say. You said "relatively low hours" - in my experience, good teachers work significantly more than 40 hours a week, and spend their summers taking continuing education classes, going to conferences to learn better ways to get the kids engaged, and tutoring kids to pay the bills in the summer.

For what it's worth, I've long been curious about the voucher system - I don't believe the public school system has any monopoly on an ability to educate; having been to both a parochial school and a public one I have a little experience in both areas.

I have to agree with Shimpei - parents are morons. (not that it was said quite THAT bluntly) Look around at the parents we have today. I'm not sure if they are unaware of the "incentives" you mention for them to care about their children's education, or just don't care, but the end result is the same. Perhaps it is a self-feeding cycle - the public school system sucks, so education end results decrease, so the parents of the next generation and the next generation and the next generation are unable to see a way to make a difference (or indeed unable to even see that a difference is needed)...

You have parents that don't know what grade their children are in. They don't know the teacher's name, they are happy if their kid doesn't end up in jail; doing homework is waaaay down the totem pole of worries. And not to throw the absolute lowest in there as a red herring, perfectly normal lower middle class people seem to have gotten the idea that education is the school's job, and they don't have to worry about it. They don't remember much from their middle & high school years, and they turned out just fine - that attitude is not lost on the kids, trust me. And even upper class, educated people can be stupid - take this example from my mother's school. This parent is an upper class, college grad (at least Masters level, possibly higher), running for the school board mother. One of the exercises my mother did with her students was to send home something that the student had to 'teach' to the parents, have a family discussion over dinner (you understand it better when you have to try to explain it to somebody else, right?), have the parent sign & bring back. After the first one, this student said her mother said she didn't have time. My mom thought there might have been a wire crossed in communication, after all, this parent was on the school board, obviously she had time for her child's education, right? Nope, when she asked the woman, she was told "yeah, the first couple were okay, but I just don't have time for that."

Don't even get me started on parents who believe that the bible is absolute literal truth; they're the reason we have a book at the Grand Canyon claiming it was made by Noah's flood; why we have a president in the White House who said that God told him to invade Iraq and believes he was called to lead the nation at this time...