In the NY Times is an article No Child Left Behind? Ask the Gifted, about how children with high intelligence rarely get their needs met. As we've mentioned before Cheri Pierson Yecke's book The War against Excellence: The Rising Tide of Mediocrity in America's Middle Schools, the public schools spends something like 15 times more money for the children at the bottom 3% of the intelligence scale, than for the top 3%. The public school system is failing to help gifted children develop their talents. With homeschooling parents can help each children develop to their full potential.
It is always nice to have data. Joanne Jacobs found a census report on how much money the United States is spending on kindergarten to 12th grade. In 2004 it was $8,287 per student. Here are a selection of some of the comments to Joanne's post:
"So... we now spend about twice as much per student (adjusted for inflation) as we did fifteen-twenty years ago. Do you think we're getting twice as much for the money?"
"Problem is, it's a failing system. In the real world, failures don't survive that long."
"My main beef with the education establishment is over the quality of their product, not the price."
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Technorati tags: gifted, education, War against Excellence, school spending, school waste
2 comments:
this study is why we homeschool
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To anonymous:
Someone once commented that the reason there is so much sex education in public schools is not because it is so complicated. The claim was that by frequently discussing sex in detail someone people hoped that children would be more likely to experiment with sex.
To myrtle:
One of the interesting points Cheri Pierson Yecke makes is that talented and gifted children often need an individually tailored education. Normally gifted children have very different strengths. A child who is gifted in math may struggle with English.
Another book that I liked about the problems gifted children suffer in public schools is: "Genius Denied: How to Stop Wasting Our Brightest Young Minds" by Jan Davidson, Bob Davidson, and Laura Vanderkam.
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