>>I'm not at all against home schooling. However, this can be a tricky issue. Karol is an experienced teacher. However, her certification only covers K-3 so she'd be out of her area of expertise in the higher grades and would probably not be able to meet the needs of the children.
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>>The issue I'm getting at is quality and neither the home, private or public school is guaranteed to be a high quality approach simply because they are home, private or public.
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>>Like Mark alluded to you need quality and candidly there are a lot of bad home, private and public school teachers. I think the 'trick' is having enough determination and sense to be able to figure out who's who.
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>We are home schooling our 1st grader now [like I explained to Mike on another reply to this thread]. The materail available to home schoolers is incredibly good. Most moderately intelligent adults would be quite capable of home schooling their children as lon as the adult is well disciplined. We misjudged the 1st grade teacher and had serious problems with her. So we pulled her from the school in February. We plan to enroll Kate in 2nd grade this Fall at a neighborhood public school which we have thoroughly evaluated as well.
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>The Junior High school in our district is the problem school. So if it has not changed, we will home school the kids through those grades before sending them off to High School.
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>I believe in personal responsibility above any gov't entity, so our responsibility is to study, evaluate, re-evaluate, monitor, be nosey, ask hard questions of those who would teach or children as well as question our kids. We are diligent enough and have the resources to pull our children out of any school and restart home schooling if the need arises.
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>Since I care about those less fortunate, I am a huge advocate of 100% school choice by parents or guardians to place their kids in whatever accredited school they want with the ability for the equivalent tax dollars to follow that child. The amount of tax dollars needed to send a child to a competitive school in almost all cases is less than the amount of funding provided per child in public schools. In the long run, the costs would go down and most kids learning would increase.

I agree. Don't forget that the money rolls over about seven times in the community either way, which is where the biggest economic empact comes from. The greatest opposition comes from the NEA and its vested interest in the status quo. I was an NEA member for 9 or my 10 years as a public hs teacher. The ninth year was an eye-opener. Long story...
but the bottom line is that the NEA doesn't give a flip about the education of your children as much as they want the political and philosophical attitudes of your children to be molded not by you, but by them.
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