In article ,
Bob Coleslaw wrote:
Is it better for the government to give out vouchers so parents can
send their kids to private schools, or to use that money to fix up the
public schools?

On this question, I have no problems. The public schools,
as they are run, are hopeless. The idea that children
should be with their age groups, instead of being taught
to the best of their abilities, whatever they may be, is
antithetic to real learning. Even the idea of a child
being in a "grade" needs to be scrapped.

Also, most of the teachers can no longer teach concepts.
One does not learn to understand concepts by memorization
and other rote material. The not too strong mathematics
courses of most of a century ago have been scrapped in
favor of teaching how to get answers where the questions
are not even known, instead of incorporating the conceptual
advances of the late 19th and early to mid 20th centuries.
Attempts to teach the concepts to teachers have been
largely unsuccessful; they know too much that ain't so.

At this time, we do not have a good idea how to teach well,
so we will need to have lack of control. There are now
very few academic private schools. Most will continue to
use the public schools while we find out how to do even a
fair job of teaching, and I suspect we will end up with
mainly electronic schools, not computer programs.

--
This address is for information only. I do not claim that these views
are those of the Statistics Department or of Purdue University.
Herman Rubin, Department of Statistics, Purdue University
Phone: (765)494-6054 FAX: (765)494-0558