Rpm, the schools are already commercial enterprises. The bottom line is...the bottom line. There is a mindset in the public schools that equates success with size and "efficiency." Bigger schools are seen as being the most efficient, and so, for several decades now, schools have done everything possible to increase their enrollments.
Burgeoning class sizes and school enrollments have, indeed, led to greater dollar efficiency. Yet, this has come with a multitude of problems: higher crime rates and violence; a lack of time on the part of teachers to devote to individualized instruction; a dilution of time, effort, and money into superfluous courses; a proliferation of "social" courses that divert attention from mastery of the core curriculum; state-mandated guidelines and paper work that suck most of the joy out of teaching; "fad" teaching methods that have taken the place of time-tested methods of language and math instruction that have worked for thousands of years.
Relating to that last example, let me state that rote-memorization is going the way of the do-do. In a recent educational workshop I nearly came to blows with a group of elementary teachers who are dead-set against any form of math instruction that involves rote memorization and drill. They would rather teach the "method" for finding the answer than the answer itself. When I asked them, rather bluntly I might add, if any of them ever used full-class or individual drill to help their students memorize their multiplication tables I was answered with blank stares.
If you have wondered why American students lag so far behind their foreign counterparts in math achievement, there is your answer. If you ever find your child doing their multiplication tables on their fingers you need to go slap hell out of their math teachers.
There is a reason that parochial school students outperform their peers in the public schools. Parochial schools do not embrace these educational fads. Each of their graduating classes proves that the old ways are, indeed, the best. That is why so many of our national and state legislators who are so firmly opposed to vouchers and home-schooling send their own children to private schools.
Home-schooling allows parents concerned about the negative influences of modern society upon their children, such influences being concentrated to a great degree in the public school system, to pull them out and take over the task of educating them themselves. Most parents know that the so-called benefits of socialization with large numbers of children their own age in the public schools are largely overblown. Children can interact with others of their own in a variety of settings other than in the classroom, whether in the church, boy or girl scouts, or local neighborhoods.
The State Department of Education in California recently concluded a very expensive study of the factors that lead to better student achievement and concluded: that students learn best when school and classroom sizes are small and teachers have more time for individualized instruction.
Well DOH! I could have told them as much, and it wouldn't have cost them nearly as much money.
