In my opinion, the public education in the United States really sucks. I only went for my freshman year of high school (was homeschooled up until then, now am going to community college instead), but it was the biggest amount of time I have ever completely wasted in my life.
Here's how a normal day would go (We had A day B day schedule. Four classes a day, but twice as long):
-Ride the bus for a half hour to school
-Go to English first hour. The teacher would give us one or two worksheets to begin the class. The work sheets total time took about 20 minutes. We handed the worksheets in, the teacher would do a quick completion grade, and then we would sit there for 1 whole hour while the teacher just sits on his computer playing solitaire. Unless there was a test, then he would give us the test (It's really a 20 question quiz), we finish it in less than a half hour, we sit there while he grades them, and then just sit there doing nothing after.
-Go to Spanish second hour. The teacher gave us all "spanish" names, and every day we had to get in a circle and say everyone else's spanish name. I don't see what was to be gained from that at all... The teacher would hand us a vocab sheet, we would study it for 5 minutes, then play "games". There was battle ship where you had to say the numbers and letters in spanish, and you would have to say "you sunk my ship" in spanish. There were other stupid games like "sparkle" where we all got in a circle and a word would be said, and it would go around the circle with everyone spelling the next letter of it.
-Lunch for a half hour.
-Go to Biology third hour. I am not going to complain about biology because I actually had a good teacher who taught us something.
-Fourth hour go to concert band. I signed up for percussion, which includes the xylophone, snare drum, bass drum, tamberine, vibes, and triangle. The only problem was, each song only used about 3 of the 6 instruments we had in percussion, and we had 12 people in percussion. So I pretty much laid there sleeping on the floor for over an hour until it was my turn to play for 10 or 15 minutes.
-30 minutes of AE (time to do your homework). The only problem was that I already had about 6 hours that day of sitting around to do it already, so it's just nap time again.
So that was my A day. Overall a productive day
B day:
-Ride the bus for half a hour.
-Go to gym for first hour. Gym class was ok.
-Go to keyboarding for second hour. We are given three 2 minute timings that we have to have done by the end of two weeks, getting at least 40 words per minute for an A. My first try on all 3 timings, I got a 112 WPM, 108 WPM, and a 118 WPM. We also had to do 3 typing exercises every day which took in total 10 to 15 minutes tops. So I was always left over with at least an hour (usually more) per typing class period to do absolutely nothing.
-Go to orientation to technology (drafting). This was an ok class, except for about a class period every week where the people who were ahead (actually doing the work) had to sit there a whole class period helping and just waiting for the other people in the class to catch up.
-Go to math class where our teacher has absolutely no control over the class. Everyone's got their phones out, playing songs on their phones out loud, and just being obnoxious. The teacher spent over half the class period just trying to get control over her class, but our class knows that she wouln't really punish anyone for being stupid. She once threatened to get the detention book out and start writing names and everyone just laughed out loud because they knew she wouldn't do it.
To me, this does not sound like a very "efficient" learning environment. All the politicians say that we need to throw more money at our schools so our kids learn more, but it never helps. The problem is the teachers. Everyone says that teachers are so underpaid (which 45k for 9 months of work with spring break, winter break, all holidays...etc. off isn't bad), but I don't believe that. I think that good teachers are underpaid.
The first of 10 principles of economics states that people respond to incentives. If there is no incentive to do a good job, then most wouldn't. This is the problem with government run jobs and unions. The teachers have a contract guaranteeing them a job no matter how bad they are at teaching. They also have a set pay, so it doesn't matter if they are the best teachers in the world or the worst, they still make as much as the guy next to them. This is why communism fails: no incentive to do a good job. We actually have a teacher at our school that was so bad, they took her out of her classroom teaching and now she pretty much does nothing, but gets paid because she's "under contract". It's ridiculous.
Since government will never make the pay scale unequal for taechers, I think that either:
A) The government run education system should be completely removed. This would save people many thousands of dollars a year that could be used to send their kids to private school. Not only that, but then when your kids aren't in school anymore, you would still save money because right now you pay for other people's children to go to school for the rest of your life, even if you don't have any kids.
Good private schools don't have that all teachers get paid equal even if you suck crap, and they don't have to be guarenteed the job for 20 years. This will force teachers to actually try to teach kids something so they don't lose their job, or so they get higher pay. When there's an incentive to do better, people will do better.
B) Give people who are sending their kids to private schools/homeschooling their tax money back that's going towards the public education system. If I'm not being sent there, why should my parents have to pay for it? If a kid is sent to private school right now, it's obviously a huge amount of money because it's like you are paying for your kid to go to 2 different schools when they are only using 1.
Anyways, I just wanted to hear some other people's thoughts on this. There's no reason for our education system not to be #1 in the world (which it isn't even close now). Government is the most inefficient run business in the U.S., whether it be run by democrat OR republican. I don't think that the most inefficient business of this country should be running the education system, but that's just my opinion.
Edit: Wow, I just realized how long this post was... Sorry![]()








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