Kindergarten Burnouts?

[Jesper]

Kids in kindergarten can't read? Seriously?

School needs to be about teaching children to think (that is, how), and providing them with the resources to think in many different fields.

More art. More music.

I was surprised as well. I always thought that the "reading grade levels" that children test for were ridiculously low compared to the actual level of the average kid, but maybe I was wrong.

[Belle Hibiki]

Fareed Zakaria actually touches on this subject in his book The Post-American World. The issue with education isn't that children are inherently more difficult to teach these days, but that the "good" kind of education isn't well dispersed.

There's a huge gap in educational quality in public schools from district to district and state to state. While many children are among the worst in math and science, others score very closely with children in Shanghai, which is the runaway leader in world test scores.

These are all public schools, but management and community support make a huge difference. (It would also be helpful if the state didn't always see education as the first thing to slash when it's looking for budget solutions.)

In an ideal world, I'd 1) like to see teachers paid more to make the teaching profession more attractive. The work is not easy, and many beginning teachers have to devote their summers to taking additional classes for years after their work starts. You wake up early, work a long, chaotic day, and after it you have to stay and grade homework and tests, then come up with a lesson plan for the next day. It's a long hard road to hoe, and the field is littered with stories of teachers without aid that have hit burnout in a year. All this work and responsibility, and in many areas they're paid peanuts for it until they hit tenure.

2) Small class sizes. You guys are totally right when you said public education can't give students enough individual attention, but homeschooling isn't necessarily the answer. If we can get more teachers and schools into the system, I'd like to see classes around 10-15 students in size. I think this would strike a balance between the necessary societal development that happens in school and the individual attention that many children need.

Aside: I'd advise against homeschooling, though I can only offer anecdotal evidence as to why. The kids that I know that were homeschooled were unable to cope with the real world's expectations. At home, there was always a pat on the back waiting for them, even when they failed. Perhaps this could be ameliorated by hiring a tutor, but full-time tutors are expensive as fuck, and if you can afford them, you probably live in an area where the public school isn't terrible anyway.

[Pinky]

Student vouchers. Vouchers enable less wealthy homes to send their children to privates, which has been proven able to improve student scholastic performance time and again when compared to the same students' performance in government-run schools, particularly for minorities. After so many years of fighting against vouchers to protect teachers' unions (which exist almost entirely in the "public" sector) even the Democrats are started to realize this.
http://rightdemocrat.blogspot.com/2009/0...chool.html
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/campaign-...ed_to.html

Not only are student performances better, but the average cost per student in private school is much lower than most have been told especially compared to the average cost of a student in public school, public sector teachers do get paid fairly averaging over $36/hr and work less than 40/hr weeks but retirees and union dues eat a lot of it, educational materials are better and class sizes are smaller so the environment is better.
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=3231
http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/cr_50.htm
http://www.educationbug.org/a/private-sc...-cons.html

And I still promote home schooling. Studies in the USA in 1991 and 1997, of over 2 and 5 thousand home schooled students, respectively, find the average performance of home schooled students were above the 80th percentile in all subjects, and 20-30 points higher than public school students in all subjects. More studies have been done which consistently find the same results. Since we're talking about overall population performance I can't give credence to anecdotes, you'll always find some exceptional cases no matter what you're talking about, and if an issue is decided by exceptions then it becomes a tyranny by the minority.
http://www.omninerd.com/articles/The_Ben...eschooling
http://www.hslda.org/docs/nche/000010/200410250.asp
http://newsblaze.com/story/2007100403040...story.html

[Jonathan Meer]

Holy shit, $36 an hour?