I know this will open the floodgates of negativity, but I just wanted to add:
When my son started school, the Public school system determined he was not keeping up with the curricula, got him a TON of extra support (roughly 6 hours a week, with three different people. ). Now in Third grade, he’s roughly 6 months behind instead of several years, and is reading rather proficiently.
So…figured I’d throw one positive thing out there in amongst the sea of Public School Failures.
(Sure, we can go down the patch of “Well you obvously live in an upper-scale part of town and it’s the underfunded sections that really need the…yadda yadda.”
That’s not what this thread is about. This thread is about examples that are counter to the ‘accepted norm’.
In Australia the best performed schools are the public selective schools.
Most people I know went to public schools, and most people I know got excellent educations. Recently one of my high school math teachers died fairly suddenly. His memorial drew students he had taught in 1973 and they got kinda teary eyed over his math class (and not because he was a warm fuzzy person - he WASN’T). For real, the man was a legend.
Maybe in some places its the done thing to crap on public schools. There are some poorly performing schools – unsurprisingly in districts where the students have a lot of other problems, like income insecurity, food insecurity, housing insecurity that kinda make it hard to study your best – but I see no evidence that public schools are all or predominantly failures. shrug Kinda like some people go on and one and on over what evil shitholes Catholic schools are. I’m sure there’s the good and the bad. There’s good and bad in all things.
There are some excellent public schools out there, and we are fortunate enough to live near one. I knew of at least 2 boys with some variant of autism who attended while my son was in high school. The district did a LOT to help them. One of their techniques was to train student volunteers and pair them with the boys, so that the autistic kids got some extra mentoring and role monitoring, plus a friendly face rather than someone picking on them. The volunteers got school credit for the time, as well as an education in what life is like for others. It was a win-win all around, and apparently it worked well. One of the boys is about to finish his Bachelor’s degree in biology, I think, and is looking for a Master’s program.