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Seen at Our Grammar School
September 18, 2012 Competition

One of the (formerly) attractive aspects of sending one’s children to a non-government school is that the school could experiment with new educational techniques, expose students to different subject matters, and put students in different classroom settings than the 90% of American children that are enrolled in Cookie Cutter Central School District Neil Armstrong School #1. But this is looking to be more like a myth than reality to me. Our school just sent us very slick packets describing how we are going to make sure our kids adhere exactly to these fantastic Common Core standards.

I’m in the mood for a long thesis on this. But if I wanted my kids to have the Common Core experience, I would have sent them to the local government school. And of course, to put icing on the cake they really felt it necessary to put that Keynes quote on the pamphlet? Really. Do they NOT see the irony? Putting everyone through a government/expert created school curriculum that everyone goes through is a bit of an old idea, no?

Barfaroni. Just putting a famous quote on a piece a paper from a famous person doesn’t sound like a scientific way to promote an authoritative stance. By the way, our 1st grader and our kindergartner have been asked by the school to sell magazines to help support their school. They asked me why they need to do this. I said it is because government schools are free, and the government forces many of us to pay taxes to send other children in the neighborhood to those schools – we need all the help we can get to keep your school from going away.

Did I mention that my local school district spends over double what our Catholic school spends to educate each student. And no, it’s not because Pittsford is swimming in special needs kids like some other districts around me. And we just learned that the city of Rochester school district is in the top 10 spending districts in the United States, spending $25,000 per pupil.

"4" Comments
  1. Quote from Keynes? Rand Place? The ideology is confusing and unsubtle.

  2. The Common Core State Standards, further evidence that the public educational process is designed to produce compliant subjects rather than a citizenry with the ability to consider and evaluate the events around them.

  3. Of all the factors that predict the success of pupils …
    money spent per capita child
    teacher salaries
    classroom size
    teacher ratios
    administration ratios and salaries
    available resources
    (available technologies)
    (modern equipment)
    (good textbooks)
    location of the school neighborhood
    neighbood demographics
    income of the parents
    education of the parents
    ethnicities of the parents

    the only factor that correlates to success of the child is involvement of the parent.

    Do you care if your kids do their homework? How do you show it? Do you work with them? Also — and this is an American thing — do they do their homework until they are done with the assignments or — the Japanese way — do they work so many hours each night, going beyond the assignments? And (the clincher) are the parents actively involved in the school organization: PTA, just for openers…

    There are no guarantees. Statistical likelihoods are not personal outcomes. But if you do not want to see more John Maynard Keynes in your kids’ school, then you need to help the school find something else. … just sayin’…

  4. Keynes and Krugman make a lot more sense to me now having read the quote; I’ve never quite escaped the old idea of using logic.

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