re: #486 researchok

There is no question the GOP is part of the problem now, but their involvement is relatively recent.

The decline of the schools has been decades in the making and the straying from the basics is another component of that failure.

I saw KS’ post and I do agree. Nevertheless, I do believe we ought to give as many kids as we can a chance.

It isn’t as if Harvard Prep is opening their doors. It is the neighborhood private schools that are stepping in. I believe that is why so many parents are comfortable with the idea. They know the schools and they know what they can produce. In my opinion, if a kid and his or her parents wants to be involved and get their kid educated, lets make the effort to help, until we can fix the public schools.

As you noted earlier, there is no single answer.

As I noted earlier, the thing which seems to have the largest impact is parental involvement. The slow cultural shift that’s hurt the issue is the need for families to put both parents to work.

If’n I were trying for a real long-term solution, I’d be pushing for changes that gave parents more home-time first. Thing is that most of these are those DFH things related to reducing the Gini coefficient; of reducing the separation between rich and poor. The grossest (largest scale, not taste) methods include making taxes significantly more progressive and acting to increase the incomes at the bottom. Both have worked in the past, but history tends to be ignored these days.

Now an interesting different solution looks possible as an outgrowth of home school/ distributed learning systems. There’s a system - an outgrowth of Virginia Tech’s math emporium - that’s got excellent potential. Basically, most of the learning that has to be rote anyway is self-paced automated. There are two tiers of assistance. Tier one is online support, and can be requested by the student or auto-flagged by a certain number of failures. Tier two is done by online support who flags a local in-person instructor to meet for one-on-one help with the problem area. It looks like it’ll work for things like basic english and math, just to give two examples.

Thing is, it will still cost money. And since the biggest deal in so many eyes is cost-cutting instead of superior results we’ll probably not see it happen very much.