The fatal mistake of minority (and white) parents

In a recent online article in the Christian Science Monitor, “Racially Diverse ‘New Majority’ Set To Reshape U.S. Public Schools,” (April 15,2016), we see once again the fatal mistake made by minority parents.

The article points out that for the first time in U.S. history, non-white children will be the majority in our public schools. The frustrated parents of these children want to shape the public schools to address their concerns about the ongoing failure of these schools to give their children a decent education. For example, these parents complain that, as usual, their schools get less funding than ‘white’ schools, and that teachers in their schools are less experienced or competent than in the ‘white’ schools.

These parents are correct. Public schools are usually funded from local real-estate and/or income taxes. Therefore, if Black and Latino parents typically earn less than white parents and live in poorer neighborhoods, there is less funding for these schools. Also, many white teachers prefer to teach in white neighborhoods to avoid the drugs and violence in minority areas. Teachers are usually given preference on where they want to teach based on seniority. Therefore, many older, more experienced teachers typically choose to teach in more ‘white’, middle-income, or higher-income “safe” neighborhoods.

This problem will never go away, and minority children will be doomed to a third-rate miserable education because the system is rigged against them. When I say the ‘system’, I don’t mean the favoritism given to schools in white areas. I mean the whole government-controlled public-school system. These schools, especially in Black and Latino neighborhoods, will never improve, precisely because these schools are government-run monopolies.

Public schools are “supported” and “kept in business” through compulsory school taxes, not the voluntary tuition payments of parents, as private schools are. No matter how bad these public schools are, they stay in “business,” year after miserable year, because compulsory real-estate taxes and income taxes keep them afloat. Also, no matter how bad the teachers are, it’s almost impossible to fire them, because the teachers typically get tenure after working in the system for three years.

Therefore, there is no competition that forces these schools to improve, or go out of business. Because there is no competition, and because parents have no choice about how their kids are educated, these schools and teachers are utterly immune from parents’ anger and frustration.

In contrast, in a private school, if most parents are disgusted with the poor quality of the education and teachers in that school, they will take their children out of that school and find a better private school. The owner of the inferior private school will then go bankrupt, because his customers (the parents) have voted with their feet and their consumer dollars. That is why private schools typically give a far superior education than public schools. Each private-school owner is a businessman whose very survival depends on giving his customers, the parents, a quality education for their children. A private-school owner must prove to parents that his school is better than his competitors, or face going out of business and going bankrupt.

However, with government-run public schools, both parents and their children are literally prisoners of the education system. They have no choice in the school’s teachers, curriculum, or teaching methods. They have no real voice or economic power to change anything, because the schools and their teachers are paid by the city or state with compulsory tax dollars, not by parents voluntary tuition payments. That is why these education nightmares called public schools can fail year after year for the last fifty years, and parents remain helpless to change anything.

Moreover, even when a city or state gives minority-area public schools more money, the children still get a third-rate incompetent education. Tax-funded payments per pupil in most public schools have tripled over the last 50 years, yet our childrens’ reading and math skills, if anything, have deteriorated. This applies to both white and non-white neighborhood schools.

That is because not only are these public schools a typically-incompetent government-run monopoly, but the teaching methods in these schools are literally guaranteed to turn your children into illiterates. For example, most public schools have abandoned teaching children to read with the strict phonics method, many years ago. Instead, they “teach” children to “read” using what’s called the “look-see” or “balanced-literacy” method.

In this reading method, the child is asked to “memorize” the word based on recognizing a picture associated with the word, rather than using the phonetic sounds of the alphabet letters to sound out the word. No amount of money given to a public school will improve your child’s ability to read if public schools use this insane teaching method.

Parents, you will never get a decent education for your child in a government-controlled public school, precisely because these schools can thumb their nose at you and your anger over their incompetence. The school administrators and teachers get paid by the city or state, no matter how bad they are, and the government-enforced education monopoly has little competition.

Why do you think all the products you buy today, from cars to smart phones, keep improving in quality? It is because of fierce competition between the manufacturers of these products. For example, Apple and Samsung continually improve their smart phones to convince you to buy their phones vs their competor’s phone. Competition in the free market is the driving force that gives you fresh food, smart phones, electricity, cars, airplanes, and every other magical product we use in our modern world.

In contrast, the public schools are a monopoly-controlled education dinosaur. Walk into most public schools today, especially in minority areas, and it’s like walking back into a time-warp from 50 years ago. These education dinosaurs stagnate year after year, and will never give your child the quality education they could get in a fiercely-competitive free-market education system.

Parents, ask yourself this question: if your local supermarket sold rotten or poisonous food, would you feed your children this food, year after year? Would you continue to shop at this supermarket, or would you immediately look for a better store where they offer quality food at a reasonable price? With all the products you buy for yourself and your children every day, such as food, clothing, toys, smart phones, cars, etc, don’t you always chose the best for yourself and your children based on the money you can afford? Then why do you settle for a rotten education for your children from a government-controlled monopoly called public schools?

Parents, you are literally knocking your head against an education brick wall if you think these public schools will ever improve. If you love your children, I suggest you think outside the box. I suggest you walk around this brick wall. Walk away from these government education prisons that can ruin your child’s education and life.

Do you think you are stuck with this system, and there are no alternatives? Most parents, especially minority parents, are not aware that there are now many low-cost education alternatives you can take advantage of to give your child a great education.

You do not have to settle for a miserable government-school “education” for your precious children.

These alternatives include low-cost, K-12 internet private schools. These are real, accredited, quality private schools that can give your child a great education in the safety of your home, through the internet. In my book, “Public Schools, Public Menace,” I describe at least 23 ways you can give your child a great, low-cost education without public schools, even if you are a working parent. Parents, please, for your children’s sake, investigate these great education alternatives for your kids. Please read my book, “Public Schools, Public Menace.”

© 2016 Joel Turtel – All Rights Reserved




Some great reasons to keep your kids in public school

I don’t know why so many parents complain about their kid’s public school these days. But parents, here’s some great reasons to keep your kids in public school:

1 – Public schools can cripple your child’s ability to read. The schools use a special reading-instruction method to do this called whole-language (or balanced literacy). But that’s a good thing. Why do kids need to read anyhow? It only gives them ambitions to go to college. Parents have to shell out tens of thousands of dollars for college tuition these days, so if your child can’t read, you end up saving a lot of money.

2 – Public schools can wreck your child’s ability to do math, with “fuzzy” math curriculums. But that’s a good thing. That way, your child will not strive to be a scientist or engineer and make a lot of money. Having a lot of money causes stress, and you don’t want your kids to be stressed in life, do you? Also, if your child grows up to be a supermarket check-out clerk, you don’t have to worry. The machine scans in all the prices and will tell your child how much change to give back to the customer.

3 – Public schools violate your God-given parental rights to choose who teaches your child and what he is taught. But hell, aren’t we swamped today with too many choices anyhow? It’s only reasonable to let education “experts” who have been trained in our finest “teacher” colleges tell us how to educate our children. After all, haven’t these education “experts” done a superb job educating our children up to now?

4 – Public schools givve your child a “well-rounded” education. Your child’s day is filled with shocking sex-education classes, multiculturalism classes that spit on American values, save-the-earth environmental propaganda classes, drug-education classes that give your child all the dope about these drugs so he can choose wisely, and violence- prevention classes for those kids who get violent from being bored to death in public-school classrooms.

5 – Public schools give your children great “socialization.” Where else can your kids smoke a joint in the bathroom, meet roaming drug dealers in the schoolyards, be raped or assaulted by violent bullies on the prowl for victims, and join a racial clique that promotes harmony among the students? That’s a lot better than the “bad” socialization of homeschooling that “isolates” kids from this wonderful interaction with their peers.

6 – Public schools give your kids a great sex education. As parents, we don’t want to talk to our kids about embarrassing sex matters anyhow, so this takes us off the hook. Your child’s sex-education classes will teach her why homosexuality is a “normal” lifestyle and why sexual promiscuity is OK, as long as you remember to “protect” yourself. If your teenage daughter then decides to experiment and gets pregnant, that’s great also, because the welfare office will give your daughter monthly welfare checks, food stamps, rent subsidies, and free health care. What more can you ask for?

7 – Publiic schools will give your child free drugs. Yes, Ritalin is now the drug of choice for millions of school children. But isn’t that a good thing? Ritalin will help your son stop “fidgeting” and “pay attention” in class, even though he is bored to death. Ritalin also helps the teacher maintain discipline in the classroom. After all, if your son disrupts the class by “acting out,” the other kids can’t learn anything, right? So Ritalin is a wonderful way to mentally strap-down your child to his desk.

8 – Yoour child can “participate” in your school’s Teen-Screen program. These are “mental-health” screening programs that help determine if your teenager is mentally deranged. A health “expert” in your public school will ask your child questions such as, “have you been unhappy lately,” or “do you get along with your brothers and sisters?” From your bewildered child’s answers to these illuminating questions, the health “expert” will give his opinion as to whether your child might have a mental “disease.” He might then “recommend” that you take your child to a psychiatrist who might start your child on a cocktail of mind-altering drugs. But hell, having your child labeled with a mental “disease” isn’t that bad, is it? Your child will lose the confidence to go to college, and we’re back to advantage number one, where you’ll save a lot of money on college tuition.

9 – Your child can stay in school for twelve years. Well, maybe he won’t know how to read a bus schedule or his own diploma after twelve years, but twelve years go by fast, don”t they? Why teach your child to read at home with phonics so he becomes a great reader in only two years? My God, what will your child then do with all his free time once he can easily read War and Peace? He might actually come to love learning.

10 – Public schoolls are cheap day-care centers. We all work hard these days because income, real estate, social security, and dozens of other taxes loot half our paychecks, and big-government-created inflation sharply increases the cost of everything we buy. So since we can’t save a penny, we can’t afford private day-care. That’s why we need public schools to house our kids while we make a living to pay the bills.

11 – If we didn’t have public schools, public-school administrators wouldn’t get their bloated salaries and pensions. Then these ‘public servants’ couldn’t spend their money on new cars, fancy houses, and long summer vacations. This could depress the local economy and hurt summer-vacation towns and resorts, throwing a lot of people out of work.

12 – Most cities and states now spend close to half their budget on public-school ‘education.’ If the public schools were scrapped or sold to private-school or charter-school owners, cities and states could cut their budgets in half. They could then return millions of dollars to parents in tax refunds. But then parents could use these big tax refunds to enroll their child in a real school, a low-cost, local private school or K-12 internet private school. But we wouldn’t want that, God forbid! Giving parents control over their children’s education? What will they think of next, giving parents control of what food their kids eat at dinner?

Parents, there are many other reasons to keep your child in public school, but I hope you get the point by now.

Please read my book, “Public Schools, Public Menace.”

© 2016 Joel Turtel – All Rights Reserved




Our lucky founding fathers – they were home-schooled

In ancient Greece and Rome, the education of children was voluntary and parent-directed. This two-thousand-year-old tradition came to America in the 1650s when colonists from England set up free-market schools in the Massachusetts Bay and Jamestown, Virginia colonies. The education system in each colony varied. There were many small, private non-religious grammar schools and colleges, Quaker and Lutheran schools, fundamentalist and liberal Protestant schools, schools that taught the classics, and technical schools that taught children a trade. It was a vibrant and voluntary free-market education system that catered to children’s needs and abilities, and to parents’ budgets.

Many towns had one-room schoolhouses that local residents or church members voluntarily paid for. Also, most colonial parents taught their children reading, arithmetic, and Bible studies at home. Throughout the thirteen colonies, parents controlled and paid for their children’s education, and formal schooling in a town or church-sponsored school was voluntary.

Many children also learned a trade through apprenticeship, a respected tradition that had been around for hundreds of years. Parents often apprenticed their boys (girls mostly stayed at home) to a local tradesman or professional, like a clerk, blacksmith, or lawyer. The boy would work only for room and board, and the tradesman would teach the child his trade. George Washington learned his surveying skills as an apprentice. John Adams, our second president, apprenticed with a practicing lawyer in Boston. Apprenticing was a common way for an ambitious young man to learn a trade or profession in colonial times. Sadly, this unique and valuable learning method has almost disappeared today.

Benjamin Franklin, a brilliant writer, businessman, diplomat, and scientist, was a self-made man and mostly self-taught. Although Franklin’s father was a candlemaker, he was intelligent and well-read. He taught Ben and his other children how to read, a skill that Ben quickly learned. Young Benjamin attended a local grammar school at age eight but stayed there hardly a year. His father sent him to another “writing and arithmetic” school, but Ben failed in arithmetic there. As a result, his father then removed him from this “formal” school, and at ten years old, Ben went to work for his father.

However, Benjamin didn’t like the candle-making business, so his father introduced him to other trades to see if he liked any of them, which he didn’t. At age twelve, Franklin’s father apprenticed him to his older brother James, a printer in Boston. Unfortunately, Ben didn’t get along with his brother, so at age sixteen Ben left Boston and walked to Philadelphia to seek his fortune. In Philadelphia, he eventually opened his own printing business and became successful.

Franklin loved books and read voraciously, studied arithmetic, and even taught himself French, all from books his father gave him. He read contemporary and near-contemporary authors, such as John Bunyan, Cotton Mather, and Daniel Defoe, as well as Plutarch and other classical writers that most college students today find difficult reading.

Franklin’s education by poor but literate parents, as well as his later self-education, was not the exception at this time—it was the norm. George Washington went to sschool briefly at eleven years old. He didn’t like school much—he preferred to spend his time dancing and horseback riding. His grammar school, where he learned geometry, trigonometry, and surveying, required young Washington to know how to read, write, and do basic arithmetic before it admitted him.

George attended school for exactly two years. During this time, he taught himself practical skills he could use when he started to work, such as how to write legal forms for commerce, including leases, patents, bills of exchange, and tobacco receipts. He also studied geography and astronomy on his own, and by eighteen years old had devoured novels by Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, Daniel Defoe, and classical Roman works like Seneca’s Morals, Julius Caesar’s Commentaries, and the Histories of Tacitus.

These are difficult books most college students today have never heard of, much less read. Years later, after serving as military commander-in-chief in the Revolutionary War, Washington became a self-taught architect and designed his magnificent home at Mount Vernon. Yet, many historians consider Washington the least well-read among the Founding Fathers.

Like most of the other Founding Fathers, including Samuel Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, most average colonial Americans spent few years, if any, in formal grammar schools of the day, yet they knew how to read and write very well. Most local grammar schools expected parents to teach their children to read and write before they started school. Most colonial parents apparently had no trouble teaching their children these skills at home.

At least ten of our presidents were home-schooled. James Madison’s mother taught him to read and write. John Quincy Adams was educated at home until he was twelve years old. At age fourteen, he entered Harvard. Abraham Lincoln, except for fifty weeks in a grammar school, learned at home from books he borrowed. He learned law by reading law books, and became an apprentice to a practicing lawyer in Illinois.

Other great Americans were similarly educated. John Rutledge, a chief justice of the Supreme Court, was taught at home by his father until he was eleven years old. Patrick Henry, one our great Founding Fathers and the governor of colonial Virginia, learned English grammar, the Bible, history, French, Latin, Greek, and the classics from his father.

Abigail Adams, Martha Washington, and Florence Nightingale were all taught at home by their mothers or fathers. John Jay was one of the authors of the Federalist Papers, a chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and a governor of New York. His mother taught him reading, grammar, and Latin before he was eight years old. John Marshall, our first Supreme Court Chief Justice, was home-schooled by his father until age fourteen. Robert E. Lee, Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, George Patton, and Douglas MacArthur were also educated at home. Booker T. Washington, helped by his mother, taught himself to read by using Noah Webster’s Blue Back Speller.

Thomas Edison’s public school expelled him at age seven because his teacher thought he was feeble-minded. Edison, one of our greatest inventors, had only three months of formal schooling. After Thomas left school, his mother taught him the basics at home over the next three years. Under his mother’s care and instruction, young Edison thrived. If Thomas Edison were alive today as that child of seven, school authorities would probably stick him in special-education classes and claim he had a mental ‘disease’ like ADHD. Poor Thomas would have wasted his brilliant mind and be bored to death until they released him from his public-school education prison at age sixteen.

Many of our greatest writers and artists, such as Mark Twain, Agatha Christie, Pearl S. Buck, Charles Dickens, and George Bernard Shaw, were also home-schooled or self-taught. Irving Berlin quit school in the second grade and taught himself to be a musician. Photographer Ansel Adams and architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s parents taught them the basics at home. Joseph Pulitzer, the great newspaper publisher who created the Pulitzer Prize, was home-schooled.

This is only a partial list of great Americans who were home-schooled or never saw the inside of a public school. Most of the famous and accomplished Americans that children read about in their history books were either educated by their parents or mostly self-taught. These famous Americans’ achievements prove that to succeed in life, a child does not have to attend a compulsory, government-controlled public school.

In contrast, the appallingly-low literacy rates of our children today is a direct result of the government take-over of our children’s education since the 1890’s. That is when government-controlled public-schools became compulsory for all children.

The obvious question to ask, is why not scrap our government-run public schools and go back to a totally free-market education system? Common sense tells us that a free-market education system would work superbly in America, just as it did for almost 150 years before government usurped our children’s education.

Yet, today, government has increased its stranglehold over our children’s minds, education, and future to a horrifying degree. Why have we let government bureaucrats get away with this? To answer that question in gruesome detail, I refer you to my book, “Public Schools, Public Menace.”

© 2016 Joel Turtel – All Rights Reserved




How public school can wreck your child’s life

According to a study conducted in late April, 2015 by the U.S. Department of Education and the National Institute of Literacy, over 32 million adults in the U.S. can’t read. That’s 14 percent of the population. Also, 21 percent, or about 60 million adults in the U.S. read below a 5th grade level, and 19 percent of high school graduates can’t read at all. Many of these adults can’t write their names on Social Security cards or fill in height, weight, and birth dates on application forms.

The current literacy rate isn’t any better than it was 20 years ago. According to the National Assessment of Adult Literacy (completed most recently in 2003, and before that, in 1992), 14 percent of adult Americans demonstrated a “below basic” literacy level in 2003, and 29 percent exhibited a “basic” reading level.

Only about 3.5 percent of a 26,000-member sample demonstrated literacy skills adequate to do traditional college study, a level reached by 30 percent of secondary students in 1940 and by 30 percent of secondary students in other developed countries today.

Fifty million Americans can’t recognize printed words on a fourth or fifth-grade reading level. Consequently, they can’t write simple messages or letters.

These are grim statistics for our children in 21st century America.

Parents, your child’s life and future can literally depend on his or her ability to read well. College, a good job, economic security, access to health care, and the ability to actively participate in civic life all depend on your child’s ability to read.

According to the Department of Justice, “The link between academic failure and delinquency, violence, and crime is welded to reading failure.” The stats back up this claim: 85 percent of all juveniles who interface with the juvenile court system are functionally illiterate, and over 70 percent of inmates in America’s prisons cannot read above a fourth grade level, according to the website, www.BeginToRead.com.

Yet, per-student costs and taxes for public schools have almost tripled in the last 40 years. Now what other industry do you know of where the product’s cost triples, yet the product stinks, and remains a dismal failure?

It is only because public schools are a government-run monopoly that their incompetence is ingrained and beyond repair. Public schools do not have to improve, ever, nor does teacher competence have to improve, because these schools get compulsory tax funding to stay in business, and teachers get tenure. These public-school’s existence don’t depend on the voluntary payments of parents, as private schools do. All Americans are forced to pay real-estate and/or income taxes to “support” these schools, no matter how incompetent they are. Public schools can thumb their nose at parents, no matter how bad they are, because taxes keep them afloat, like the Post Office.

Public schools also get their customers, your children by force, through compulsory attendance laws. That is, public schools are like education prisons where the inmates are forced to “attend” for 10 years, before they are “released” when they reach 16-years old.

Most parents think that education has to be run by government, because that’s the way it’s been done for the last 100 years, and because they, the parents also went to public school. That is not the case. The education free-market in America provides a wide choice of superb private kindergartens, religious primary schools, private colleges, and private tutors. Our education free-market also gives us the incredible resources of the internet, tons of home-schooling education materials, and thousands of software programs to teach your children to read and do math at an early age.

There are now also dozens of low-cost K-12 internet private schools that you can enroll your child in. These schools are like brick-and-mortar private schools, but cost much less. They assign a special teacher to each child, have an excellent well-rounded curriculum, constant testing of your child’s progress, and help you get your child into the college of his/her choice.

Parents, if you are disgusted with your local public school, you have good reason to be. Do you want to condemn your child to a lifetime of illiteracy, low-paying jobs, and dismal future? If not, please consider walking away from these government-education prisons called public schools, and trying the life-giving breath of the education free market. I describe many more low-cost education options for your children in my book, “Public Schools, Public Menace.”

© 2016 Joel Turtel – All Rights Reserved




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