Completely privatize education; it’s far too important for governments to have any role. From Stephen Moore at The Epoch Times via zerohedge.com:
Perhaps what’s most distressing about the latest collapse in high school test scores is that no one seems to be very distressed.
You’ve probably heard the news that ACT scores have fallen for the sixth straight year. Our high school kids are less equipped for a job or college than at any time in three decades.
Why isn’t anyone in Washington or anyone in our $800 billion education bureaucracy sounding the alarm and declaring this a national emergency? It certainly puts our national security, our technological superiority, and our economic prosperity in grave danger.
Instead of outrage, it is almost as if Americans have become anesthetized to bad news about our kids.
One theory is that Americans feel about their local schools as they do toward Congress: They love their own representative but think the rest of the members are corrupt and incompetent.
Yes, there are some excellent public schools, and yes, there are thousands of great teachers. But I live in Montgomery County, Maryland, which is one of the wealthiest counties in the country, and we had to pull our kids out of the public schools because they were so bad—and because they shut down during COVID-19.
I shudder to think what’s going on in the Baltimore schools down the road.
Fortunately, my husband (of the time) and I were able to afford to send our daughter to a Montessori School from preschool to Grade 6 inclusive (in which she already was learning rudimentary calculus). After that, the tuition fees became impossible and we switched her to the public school system.
While she excelled in that system (IQ 160+), she hated it as she was better educated and more intelligent than her teachers. I cannot remember the number of “emotional health” days I kept her home and she still remained the top performing student in all her classes.
Her education at home in literature, music, art, critical thinking, problem solving was incomparable to the trite that passes for education in the public school system.