The Kansas House vote tally on school finance must have looked strange to many outside the Wichita area: The only votes from Wichita legislators for a bill that would deliver nearly $29 million in new money to Wichita schools next year came from eight Democrats and one Republican, Rep. Dale Swenson. That means eight Wichita legislators, all Republicans, voted “no.” Chief among their reasons was the three-year plan’s price tag, $610 million. Another sticking point was the new inequity it risks with property-rich Johnson County. Rep. Willa DeCastro, R-Wichita, called the bill “totally irresponsible” and said, “I think the big question is, besides gambling, how do you want to pay for it?” It’s an excellent question. But it’s also irresponsible to blow off a Kansas Supreme Court order and a legislative audit that found that Wichita schools are significantly underfunded.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
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29 Comments
Rhonda,
I listened to the debate on school funding and one of the interesting things was that not one legislator voted for the latest audit. It got zero votes.
With the plan passed by the House how do you think it should be paid for? Even teachers in Wichita have asked that gambling not be used to fund education because they do not want childrent to believe you can get something for nothing. But you seem to be in favor of that. Why?
Why do you want to put more families in poverty? Why do you want to increase addition? Why do you want to see more divorces? Why do you want to see crime increase?
Gambling is a tax on the poor. And now Rhonda you want to teach children the lesson that gambling and addiction is good. You should be ashamed of yourself.
Maybe I missed something, but I dont see anywhere that Rhonda advocated gambling. I think she is just saying that there is no free lunch, and if you want good school, you must pay for good schools. Somehow.
If not gambling, then what? If not now, then when?
I think it is so typically kansas to not only bitch and wallow in mediocraty, but to also INSIST that others wallow with you. Like Rita Mae Brown’s story about never having to put a lid on a bucket of crabs. Why? When one crab tries to crawl out and escape, the other crabs reach up and pull her back down into the bucket to die with the rest of the herd.
See any similarities here? Wichita doesnt want to tax itself for schools, so by god no one else in the state can do it either!
The real danger to wichita’s economic future is that people in joco value their schools and are willing to tax themselves to make them great.
Joco has the fastest growing economy in the state, and they need educated workers, not drones who take orders. They are investing not only in schools, which will draw more residents, they are investing in a future workforce.
Wichita, if you want to attract new business and keep the jobs you already have, you need to make some decisions about your schools, and what kind of families they will draw and what kind of future workers they will create.
I bet joco cant wait for you all to take the tack that lower taxes will grow your communituy faster than great schools will grow their population and businesses. They certainly have most of the research on their side.
Your side? The “lower taxes and they will come” side? Mostly voodoo economics that has already been largely discredited in the real world. And anyone who is in the world of work knows about the quality of the workers they deal with every day. Produced by your current schools.
So…the great kansas economic experiement commences. Great schools vs lower taxes. I know where I am gonna place my bet for the future.
How about you?
You also have to remember that there are people who live in Wichita that are in the Derby, Haysville, Andover, and Maize school districts.
Great schools will be school choice.
The drive to spend more on schools assumes that spending more will produce better results. That connection is quite tenuous.
Why not let people decide where to send their children to school? The best investment this state could make would be to return money to parents in the form of vouchers. Let them decide where to send their children to school. Let market forces tell us which schools are doing well. We would free our state of bureaucracy and unleash creativity in education.
KCL, you are exactly right. If Kansas did that, companies would be flocking to Kansas to set up business.
“The drive to spend more on schools assumes that spending more will produce better results. That connection is quite tenuous.”
KCL, I agree with this. I dont believe that throwing money at a problem is always the way to fix it.
But chronically UNDERFUNDING schools in relation to what is needed to achieve expected results is also not the way to go.
I thought the whole point of the post audit study was to settle the question, once and for all, about the amount needed to fund schools to produce the results we expect and even mandate.
I thought they were supposed to provide the reasonable figures in contract to the recommendations of the so called biased consultants.
I thought that the players in topeka, on both sides, had agreed that using post audit as an independent arbiter would settle the issue of costs.
So what now? The post audit study is dismissed like all the others preceeding it? When will there be an agreement about what it costs to educate our kids? Until we reach an agreement on cost, the rest is just rhetorical.
What good is a choice if ALL the public schools are underfunded?
Hee hee, poking a little fun here.
I would think that you “choice in schools guys”, especially joe, would like the fact that joco is willing to take responsibility for educating their own kids, no matter what the rest of the looney state does.
I thought you guys were all for personal responsiblity and taking care of yourselves. That is what joco wants to do with the local tax option. We already have school choice. It is called relocation to a different town, or send your kids to a private school.
Educating your kids is your personal responsibility. It isnt our fault if you dont take the responsibility of making enough money to educate your own children.
Cant afford the private school? Well, that is your own damn fault for spending your money on alcohol and cigs and drugs. And if you had an education and a decent non-union job, you could afford to send your kids to top schools.
If someone cant afford top schools? Let them eat cake. Money is a sign you made the right choices. Poverty means you made bad choices. Send your kids wherever you can afford to send them.
Or the ultimate in personal responsibility, lets eliminate public funding from education and you all can just pay to educate your kids without ANY tax dollars.
After all, you chose to have those kids, so now you can pay to educate them.
Hee hee. This message brought to you with a laugh and a heavy dose of sarcasm.
The ultimate and best choice is to homeschool your children.
Cheers and peace to all of God’s creatures.
The DC public school system spends more money per child than any other jurisdiction in the nation and those “students” are the worst performing in the entire Western world! some kids are just uneducable.
Cheers and peace to all of God’s creatures.
The problem Topeka is having with the audit is that it showed what legislators have said for many years and that is there is a need for consolidation in western Kansas.
But because there are so many rural legislators there is not the political will power to do what the audit suggested.
It is not about educating children it is all about money. Kansas City, MO showed years ago that more money did not translate into better performance. Even the recent Kansas audit showed that. So what is the answer? First you would have to remove the politics from the equation to get an answer.
It was interesting during the debate last week when a legislator started reading all of the idel funds school districts had sitting in long term cd’s etc. It makes you ask the question if the public is really seeing all of the numbers relating to schools or just part of them. The amounts were in the millions of dollars in different school districts across the state. I did not catch the one for Wichita or the surrounding districts. It would be interesting to get that information.
It appears that we only get part of the information and I don’t know if that is because the media does not put out all of the information or if the school districts try to hide information to make you believe they are in dire straits.
I was told that Wichita has purchased several pieces of property in case they need some new schools in the future. Also they are rebuilding a school that was not part of the bond issue because they had so much extra money.
Why not put the money in the classrooms where it belongs. There are a lot of teachers doing with out or buying supplies that could use their help. I also was disappointed that when Wichita got so much extra money last year that they did not put it into the programs they had downsized or cut.
It makes you wonder what they are doing and why they are not helping the teachers and the children in the classrooms.
JTF,
I can answer about the bond money. Wichita got very good rates and saved money on the bonds. Bond money has to be spent on projects specified it cannot go directly into classrooms. Hence they used the extra money for another project in the same vein.
As fot money for being wasted, I’m sure their is. Any government entity is going to have some waste, no if and buts about it. Public eduaction can do better. The issue is really is all the unfunded mandates that drain money from the schools. Special ed is a prime example.
As for vouchers, I say no not because I’m scared of competition, but beacuse we are talking about people who have to chose accept the education. If they chose to come to school and work they will learn and get a good education, if they don’t they won’t. Every teacher I know tries to do everything they can to help kids learn, some just aren’t equipped yet to do it either mentally or more likely socially. That can be overcome. How? More money. Inner city kids need more one on one time hence more teachers.
Consider if we ahd this argument about dentists. Is it a dentists fault if a pateient doesn’t come in or do what they are supposed to. No its not and in many ways that is exactly what teachers fight, the students choice whether or not to be a willing learner. We can always do better but its not as simple as pure market forces in this case.
by the way I was using scott, but someone else came on using that so I changed
hawkeye. Let me put it this way. Lets say that the neighborhood you lived in has a grocery store ran by the government. You are only allowed to go to that grocery store and not to any other ones.
What do yo uthink would be the quality of service, selection, and cleanliness of that grocery store?
Why should we do the same to education? Parents can only send their child to the desenated school in their neighborhood. It’s communist to do that.
Just about everything we have in our society is choice and market forces. Colleges and Universities are in this process. Since a student has a choice of schools to attend to, they can go where ever they believe they will get the best education for their money.
But k-12, you don’t have a choice. It’s sickening.
All of the above are thoughtful comments.
As the Industrial Age is closing (or essentially being transferred to the developing nations), an education system that was intelligently designed for that age is not working in the Postindustrial Age.
Let us recall that institutional education for children was made compulsory in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Children were forcibly taken from their parents. Professional educators were made to be “experts” in childhood development. This was bogus. Parents were experts in childhood development, when they raised their children for 14 hours a day.
The postindustrial economy may give us the chance to create human-scale, rather than factory-emulating childhood-development paradigms. Actually, this is already occurring, for parents who make extraordinary commitments to their children, and sacrifices.
For example, twenty years ago, public educators tried to destroy home-schooling. They fomented laws to prohibit it. They lost. Today, Emporia State University, Kansas’s first teacher-training school, welcomes home-schooled students, because they are, as a group, higher-performing students than ESU’s public-school-educated students.
Their parents took them home because they were VALUED. Their mothers (less often fathers) were willing to give up jobs, so SACRIFICES were made in family income; parents accepted smaller homes, less-expensive cars, etc. Today, the vast majority of American colleges and universities welcome home-schooled students, including America’s premier institutions of higher learning, such as Harvard, Stanford and Yale.
So, home-schooling has proved to be an effective experimental alternative to industrial-modeled education. It works for many reasons. Home-schooling parents send a message to their kids, “You are special to us. We are not going to homogenize you.” It works because children are enabled to learn according to their innate abilities. Instead of being subject to a mass-education schedule, home-schooled students are allowed to work on subjects until they achieve solid proficiency, and even mastery. In many homes, children are allowed to focus on what they do best. This doesn’t just create genuine self-esteem, it develops special talents, which is in complete accord with the postindustrial economy that seeks specialized talent and rewards it handsomely.
Alas, home-education, like traditional private schooling, is not available to everyone. It is only available to two-parent households that have sufficient one-parent incomes to allow the other parent to stay home.
But it is a vital component of 21st century education because it is inculcating humaneness. We are never going to see 100% of children home-schooled. We don’t have to. In a postindustrial society, you don’t need a universal standard. You need a variety of ideas that work in their own ways.
We should experiment with vouchers. We won’t see this become a 100% universal standard, but it should be a component of childhood education.
We should think about enlarging our geographic horizons. Kansas may create a residential math and science academy. But Kansas is not very good in math and science. So, what about working with Oklahoma, and sending Kansas’s best-and-brightest 11th-12th graders across state lines to the Oklahoma School for Mathematics and Science, which has been operating for 20 years, and has already found out what works well? Who says that we cannot cooperate?
Kansas’s top universities are KU and KSU. In JoCo, KU alumni are very active in JoCo schools. How many Eagle readers are aware that USD 259 BOE doesn’t have a single KU or KSU alumnus? It may be that Wichita has an inferiority complex. It may be that USD 259 does not want alumni of Kansas’s two best universities creating a change impetus. If so, that’s really, really sad.
When an economy undergoes fundamental change, education must become experimental. Wichita’s schools are designed for a PAST ECONOMY. But the education of children must be FUTURE oriented.
Public teachers chose education careers because these careeers provide risk-free long-term employment, great lifetime healthcare benefits, and pensions. But most young people will be entering an economy that doesn’t offer these things.
Teachers are unionized (for valid reasons in an industrial economy), but most young people today will not become unionized workers. They are going to have to work under paradigms that are completely different from those under which their teachers operate. There is a terrible “disconnect” between public education and the 21st century “real world” economy.
Childhood education doesn’t need to be REFORMED. It needs to be REINVENTED. Public educators are not “bad” people. They are people who have been indoctrinated in what was once a very useful factory-economy-based ideology that has become obsolete. Most teachers do not know how to function in any other system: it is all they have known since they themselves were young children. Those who might be able to function in a new system aren’t given the resources to create a childhood-development system for the 21st century economy.
Public education needs a lot more money. It also needs a new teaching and administrative corps.
Heartlander. Awesome post. Very informative.
May I ask you a few questions. What do you think about the concept of uniforms in government schools?
Also you talk about the school system operating on a past economy, such as the agriculturial economy that no longer exist in present day America. Basically I’m talking about kids getting the Summer off.
I known a few homeschool kids in my youth when I was growing up. Yes! They were sharp and smart, but they also were being schooled all year long. I remember in the summer time, while we were goofing off, they were studying.
Heartlander,
I don’t disagree that we need to evolve and change, but most of what you say is intellectual baloney. You want to know why home schooled kids succeed. Parental involvement. Period. its why most kids succeed
I didn’t become a teacher because it was risk free. You have no idea why teachers do what they do or put up with what they do. We becomes involved because we like kids and want to help them become better people, usually a lot easier said then done.
Joe
I’m all for uniforms, we do need to set more of a tone in school if nothing else. As for summers, year round schools don’t bother me.
Are we really comparing groceries to people. One is not involved in the process one has to be. It might surprise you to realize taht teachers just don’y open the kids heads up and pour the info in. The students actually have to be involved for it to work. Free will is a pain isn’t itQuestions for you gentlemen
If we do year round school will you raise teacher pay to reflect that?
Will you be in favor of paying for continuing eduaction fro teachers liek most employers do now?
What about the poor kids? Do we get rid of all programs designed to help them or will the voucher cover all their tuition?
If we do vouchers, do private schools have to accept all students that apply. Will private schools have to follow all the governmental rules that public schools do. ( one of the major problems that govt schools face )
Hey hawkeye
Joe WIlliams “grocery” analogy is lifted directly from Rush Limbaugh……many of Joe and IDs posts have their origins there.
I look with suspicion on any Republican efforts to “reform” public education. As with Social security and just about any goverment program or service “reform” is cover language for “do away with”.
Just some random thoughts:
–I have known a few home-schooled kids. By and large, they are as dumb as the day is long. Smart, yes, they can rattle off facts with the best of us. But absolutely no common sense and no grasp of anything in the real world. Now I know kids today from any background can’t find Kansas on a map and can’t name the current President, but in my experience it does seem publicly and privately schooled kids are a little more prepared for life outside of a textbook.
–Vouchers are freeing in appearance but in the long run, could give the government the excuse to try to control private education as well, since private schools would be receiving–in essence–government funds. And the grocery analogy is flawed in that no one is being forced to send their kids to public school. Laws only mandate that students receive an education–public school is only one option. Families with the ability to send their kids to private schools or home school (gasp) are free to do so.
–The public school system in America needs to be completely restructured and reinvented. At a museum awhile back I saw a history test from the early 1900s that was given to 5th graders–I could not pass it today as a graduate student! Yikes. Why today do we expect less out of our kids? Why are smart people, ie nerds, looked down upon and ridiculed in school? The “nerd factories” of Asia are cranking out future world leaders, Nobel scientists, etc. Folks, if we don’t do something soon, the only thing our kids will be doing is pumping their gas.
Steve,I agree with everything you wrote. The reason asian kids are smarter is because they go to school 6 days a week and 10 hours a day.
Actually JR. The “grocery” analogy was not taken from Rush Limbaugh. It was taken from an account of people living in the Soviet Union in the 1980’s, who imigrated here to the USA to find that you could go to any grocery store was a godsend.
And no! It was not played or heard on Rush Limbaugh.
And it’s not about comparing kids to groceries, but about the facility that children go to, known as schools, and the facilities that people go to for food.
I’m suspucious of any leftist who uses Rush Limbaugh as an excuse.
Very good, Steve! Thank you for contributing! You make this a better forum!
To Hawkeye,
You accuse me of intellectual baloney. That’s fine. Now, if you are a teacher, why are you unionized? Are you aware that the first teachers union was created in Chicago, under guidance from the meatpackers union? Do you understand the connection here between public education and an industrial economy that wanted lowly-educated workers, people who were tractable, but would not have ambitions to go to college?
You do not have to feel threatened. Fundamental reinvention of education will not be implemented for at least 20-30 years. I don’t know if you value mathematics, but do you know that Lexington, KY has a public magnet middle school that has 2-hour-long math classes? Not for remedial students, but for mathematically-and-scientifically gifted students. KU Chancellor Robert Hemenway came from UK. His career was advanced by UK President Charles Wethington, Ed.D. (UK) Dr. Wethington is out now. His replacement is Lee L. Todd, Ph.D, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Hemenway’s former position, UK-Lexington Chancellor, has been eliminated with the severance of the UK Community College System from UK. UK is in the process of becoming a first-tier research university.
Home-schooled students are”dumb as doornails” in practical things? Education IS practical. The NIH’s Human Genome Project’s director was home-schooled. This project is generating data that will make better medicines and generate vast economic returns over the next half-century.
One of my children’s tutoring has helped several African American students get into medical schools. They will serve their communities, and make very good incomes to boot. He’s going to Africa to teach. Then, with his Ivy League honors degree, he’ll be admitted to our top law schools.
As far as home-schooling parents being committed, thank you for reinforcing my point. Home-schooling doesn’t just requre commitment, it TEACHES commitment. Parents who attended traditional schools must LEARN new things. Are you saying this is undesirable? I don’t think so. I just think you haven’t really thought about this.
As to vouchers, they don’t have to cover all costs.But they can give parents a reachable opportunity to make worthwhile sacrifices. Parents who can’t afford private school tuition entirely, may be able to make up a difference between tuition and voucher values. This is what a lot of parents do in sending their financial-aid-receiving kids to college.
At the nation’s top college preparatory schools, a method invented in 1831, called the Harkness Table at Phillips Exeter, has 12 students and a teacher sitting together. Students have to study before class, and then round-table discussions are held about the subject matter that students are prepared to talk about. Do you use this method? Have you asked for a round table?
Have you lobbied for 2-hour math classes as a new standard? If not, why not?
As to “intellectual baloney”, have you followed the major developments in intellectual property rights? This is where the practical “money” is in the 21st century economy.
Have you read Thomas Friedman’s “The World is Flat”? You really should. Because Kansas’s economy in this century is going to be dictated by global change.
This isn’t new, by the way. Kansas has been owned by three nations (Spain, France and the U.S.) and before this, it was populated by Asian immigrants. Its current population was transported from Europe and Africa, and more recently it has recruited people from Mesoamerica (who being mostly Indian blooded are actually Asian descendants). Kansas has ALWAYS represented globalization. You aren’t going to stop this. The question is, how can Kansans learn to take advantage of this?
I’m just trying to explain to you what is happening here. If you aren’t interested in learning, and grasping more than you currently do, that’s your choice. It’s a free country. But you don’t have a right to prevent children from understanding how things work.
Sorry, the “dumb” analogy was Steve’s and I misquoted him. But “dumb as doornails” and “dumb is the day is long” imply precisely the same thing.
BTW, I did a lot of farm work, and spent many hours doing minimum wage jobs during the school year. I have two home-educated children who earned $20/hour tutoring BEFORE they went to college. I think their jobs, making 4 times as much as their cohorts, was pretty practical. They learned that KNOWLEDGE PAYS.
On uniforms, it’s a double-edged sword. On the positive side, it eliminates salacious attire. On the other hand, it eliminates “free expression”, but actually this mostly encourages kids to follow fashion, rather than be self-creative. My youngest child got into a university that doesn’t have a dress code, but most students dress “preppily”. They dress pre-professionally. I think some outfits represent poor self-esteem.
On full-year schooling, this is essential. Kids forget things over a 3-month summer vacation. (Vaca means “cow”.) Classes have to waste the fall quarter reviewing last year’s information, before they can give students new information. In our home-schooling regimen, my kids studied 46 weeks per year, and they worked Saturday mornings.
I’m not in favor of 10-hour study days, because kids need recreational time. They need time for the lessons they have learned to be processed by their brains.
Teachers need more time to process knowledge. They should not be teaching more than 4 hours per day. Women teachers, in particular, have their own child-raising and household-management duties that men cannot understand. Give the women teachers too much teaching work to do, and they will necessarily over-simplify education, such as giving true/false, multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank and single-sentence examinations, rather than expository examinations that require far more time to grade. Most often they will use exams devised by textbook publishers, rather than design their own exams, and grade them.
But in following these regimens, they are failing to teach kids how to learn how to do written-expression, how to make complex arguments, whether the course be English, Social Studies, or Math and Science.
I know this is dreaming but….
I went to a one-room country school, with all grades in one room under one teacher. I attended there until I was in the fifth grade.
Parents WERE so involved, as was the entire community. Every day. They followed us after we graduated. We were always “their kids” no matter how old we got. Even at my mom’s funeral, they came on walkers and in wheelchairs becasue I was one of theirs.
I wish every kid could have that wonderful experience and get the kind of education, community praise, and teacher attention that we received. And interaction with all ages.
We ALL played softball at recess, from first to eigth grade. We had too. There werent enough people to even play games unless we ALL played.
I remember big eigth grade boys on their knees pitching to us little kids so we could hit and run at least once during the game. :)
Many of us later skipped grades because we were so far ahead of our “town school” peers when they consolidated and then bussed us to town. Mostly because when the teacher was busy, the older kids helped us little ones with what we were learning.
I dont have the answers here, and I know I am guilty of ozzie and harriet thinking here, but damn.
WHY CANT EVERY CHILD HAVE THAT GREAT OF AN EDUCATION!!!!!!
Good grief, writing that brought me to tears. I wish that experience wasn’t gone from our state landscape. I dont know how to create a modern day equivalent, but I sure wish we could.
KFG how blessed you were… I could only wish for that kind of education for my children.. the good ol’ days… I think sometimes the closest we can get to that is homeschool… you were very lucky.
My grandma was a one-room country grammar school teacher. My great-uncle was a high school music teacher.
Big isn’t better. Two years ago, while traveling in Vermont, the local NPR station discussed consolidation–the concensus was, it didn’t improve education for rural students. It’s like anything else in life: if you LIVE in a community, you feel an OBLIGATION to the people with whom you live. If you are the controller of a system, living at a distance, you view people as statistics on a ledger. You can’t help it. You’re given numbers. You deal with those.
Do you want to get radical (radical means root)? How about breaking up USD 259 into five or six smaller districts? How about stopping busing, and letting children attend neighborhood schools?
How about letting math-and-science “geeks” study math and science four hours a day? Talented young musicians develop their talents four hours a day? Gifted painters do same? Gifted writers do same? Kids who want to work in a greenhouse and hand-cultivate high-value plants? Kids who love mechanics hand-building cars and airplanes?
Let me assure you, if childhood education were reinvented, you’d have a lot more happy, motivated students, and attract really talented teachers who think, “I can make a lot more money elswhere, but this is really cool.” Did you know that Apple co-founder Steve Wosniak is now a math and science teacher?
When we deeply think about children, their talents are amazing. We do them a disservice, and our nation, by trying to fit them into a standardized-for-all learning process. Some of your kids really love to read, but aren’t interested in math. Some of your kids want to be artists. If you don’t try to homogenize them, you can get astonishing results.
My kids are going to universities in which they had to write essays, demonstrating what their aspirations, challenges and views were. They were interviewed, one-on-one with people who sought to find out, “Will you thrive here? Will you contribute to our community? What do you bring that we don’t already have?” They received rec letters from people who knew them, who pointed out their strengths and weaknesses. So well-educated admissions officers decided, “We want these people to join us.”
I went to a university that only applied mass-formulas. A computer basically determined my candidacy. Then clerical workers checked the data, and I got in. We’re human beings. Is this what we want for our children? Teachers are being forced to teach to tests. They’re being forced to generate numbers that go into the university computer. Is this what you want for your children?
I went through this. I wanted something DIFFERENT for my children. I would like to see YOUR children have something different.
I mean, “We want these young people to join us”.
Heartlander, gifted kids get the short end of the stick every time. No one worries about them. Many teachers fear them. Adults only want to control them or beat them down. Few adults are willing to engage them in something challenging and meaningful. It takes special people and customized programs for gifted children.
If the public schools cant or wont help them reach their potential, they need outside mentors. Otherwise, they will be like my late husky. Too smart by half, always creating mischief for her amusement.
She needed a sled to pull or interactions with humans. Gifted kids need the same. Great tasks, untertaken with support, produce great leaders.
We sure could use a few of those in this world!
What you write is so true. I had a half-wolf/half-Siberian husky. I’d take him fishing and he’d explore a little bit, then sit next to me. I had to leave him to go to work. He was so lonely. He howled. Then he broke free, and found somebody who wanted him all the time. The finder called me, and we had a talk, and I realized the caller was a better-suited companion, so I offered to let him take my dog, and he was really pleased.
In my own experience, I don’t know if teachers fear gifted kids. Maybe they do. I think that what many of them do is feel that gifted kids will succeed, according to standard metrics, so this is good enough.
But I’ve seen highly gifted kids messed up. For example, I remember a student who was head-and-shoulders above his classmates who didn’t do a senior-year English term paper. Rather than admit that he wasn’t given proper training to write a term paper, his English teacher flunked him, so he didn’t graduate. The second and third smartest students in his class went to Princeton and Annapolis.
I was two years behind him. I wrote the required paper, under total stress because nobody showed me how to write a term paper. I wrote ten pages of crap the night before the turn-in date. I got a B.
I have a friend who took AP English 22 years ago. I’ve looked at her papers. They’re really good. She was sick as a youngster and missed a lot of school. She didn’t do well in math, so her parents hired a tutor. Suddenly she blossomed. But then when it seemed she had “caught up”, tutoring was stopped, and she fell to mediocrity in math. I’m teaching her middle-school son in math, who was deemed by his teacher to probably have to repeat pre-algebra. He’s got amazing talent. His mother is providing wonderful assistance in helping her son to do homework. She has very high mathematical talent. But regular schooling failed to cultivate this talent. Had it been properly cultivated, she could have earned an M.D. or Ph.D. easily. I’ve educated doctoral students, so I have a comparative “database”. This mother has extraordinary mathematical talent, as does her son.
I gave up a $400,00 income to home-school two gifted kids. My income wasn’t the sole sacrifice I made, I had to surrender my professional persona, which was much, much harder than giving up the money. But given the chance again, I’d do it in a heartbeat.
Home-education isn’t factory-scaled, it’s HUMAN-scaled. When my kids applied to universities, they had to write essays that said, “This is me.” They went to interviews and met with talented minds. They had rec letters from people that were reallly meanigful. They didn’t get computer scored as I did when I went to universit. They were human-evaluated, and as a result, they were admitted to universities whose well-educated and very talented admissions committee members really WANTED them to JOIN their communities.
These universities are rated “most competitive”; they have 98-99 Princeton Review admissions selectivity scores and are top-10 ranked by US News and World Report. Wichita probably has 30 students each year who could be admitted to such universities if they were properly taught.
One of my children scored a 50th percentile on the SAT, at the Ivy League university he was admitted to. But in his freshman year, he didn’t rank at the midlle of his class, he ranked at the 94th percentile of his class. I don’t teach to the test.
I was a National Merit Scholarship Finalist, so I know how to teach to the Industrial Age standardized test, but this isn’t what I do. I teach how to think, and argue ideas. Some people call this “intellectual baloney”. This is because they don’t know how to do it. They took simplistic true/false, multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blank tests in high school and college. They never saw a final exam that had 3 questions and three hours to answer them, much less a 3-question weekend-take-home exam that required cogent expository essays.
Your gifted kids deserve the opportunity to do the latter. Their talents are way beyond T/F, multiple-choice, fill-in-the blank tests. Most of your teachers don’t “get” this.