re: #497 kirkspencer

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.

Lots to digest here.

Starting with money, that has never been the problem. We have thrown money at the schools for decades with only more decline to show for it.

The other issues you raise are far more interesting.

I absolutely agree that parental involvement is a key issue. Historically, we never had to give parents ‘time off’ to deal with school involvement. That said, if that is what it takes, I’m for it. I’ll put the kids first every time.

I like what you have to say about VA Tech’s math program. I don’t know a damn thing about it but if it works as advertised, I can see School Districts across the country putting that in every home with school age kids in addition to math taught in schools.

What do you think of community based tutor/mentoring programs? As well, what do think of online school/homework help tied to school districts curriculum?