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Without involved parents there is only so much even a great teacher can do with limited time to individually attend to a kid.

Diane Ravitch, who was assistant secretary of education under both GHW Bush and Bill Clinton, reviewed all the data (and had a PhD to understand it). https://dianeravitch.net/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

She found that the one factor that was most strongly associated with educational achievement was the parent's income. That's the best scientific evidence.

If you want parents to be involved, you have to eliminate poverty and raise their income. It's not sufficient, but it's necessary. A mother can't read to her children or take them to a museum if she's working 60 hours a week at a fast-food restaurant.

If you want parents to do a better job, give them the resources that they need to do the job.

This is the true reason why media outlets were saying "Gamers are Dead". The gamer "identity" of fun loving visceral experience seeking had to be replaced by the mundane passive "player" (as the SJW journalists said). That's why, "Games don't have to be fun". Look up the "serious games" initiative. In addition to the current opinion attitude and conformism factors that schools are recording in federal database about your children, gates wants to make it so that students can't like about their opinions on standardized tests by strapping kids into lie detectors in the name of collecting stats on teacher engagement with students.

So, media outlets were paid to create a crisis, just like Gates Thinktanks created a crisis in STEM. The same modus operandi was used: "Misogyny in STEM" vs "Misogyny in Games!", "Not enough Women in STEM" vs "Not enough Women in Games", "Harassment in STEM" vs "Harassment in Games Industry", etc.

Educational games had failed already in the 90's, so the stigma of games as a purely entertainment medium had to be dispelled. MS purchasing Minecraft for educational games was yet another example of the push for "serious games". It sounds outlandish, but this really is the truth behind the #Gamergate PSYOP.

Beware parents. Games are far more involving than TV, film or music which have all been co-opted by propagandists. Now they seek to implant propaganda in education and educational games (which record far more fine grained data than any test could) and your children won't even be able to lie about believing in the BS in order to graduate. If you truly care about education see the links I posted then do some more research on #Gamergate, the rabbit hole is very deep and has connections to the common core cluster fsck.

The people who put down public schools and experienced union teachers are "visionaries" but they don't have facts to back them up. If you want the facts, do a Google search for "Diane Ravitch."

Ah yes, a single data point proves everything. Sorry. No.

I have had exceptional public school teachers that cared about the students, knew their material, and provided a rich, learning environment. I have had hideous public school teachers that made it obvious that they hated the students, wished they were elsewhere, and only because thy had been on the job so long and were tenured that it was too late to change careers at that point. I have had public school teachers at almost every point in between.

I'm extremely glad that you had only exceptional experiences with public school teachers. But please, don't start pretending that you're representative of all public school students' experience or that your teachers were representative of all public school teachers.

Do your homework. I said do a Google search for "Diane Ravitch." Do I have to do everything for you?

http://dianeravitch.net/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Ravitch was assistant secretary of education under GWHB and Bill Clinton. She believed in testing and charter schools and getting rid of unions. The Wall Street Journal gave her a column. But she knew how to understand data. And the data said that charter schools were failing and the testing was unscientific gobbledygook. So -- unlike some people -- when the evidence went against her, she admitted she was wrong. She has more data than you knew existed. For example, she knows about the NAEP http://nces.ed.gov/nationsrepo... which actually did a good, scientific study of charter schools and found that they were on average worse than public schools. And I'm not going to find it for you, you can look it up yourself, although you're probably too lazy for that.

There's plenty of data. And it doesn't do what the "visionaries" say. Most of this stuff has been tried before, and didn't work.

I didn't say that I had only exceptional experiences with public school teachers. I had good teachers and bad teachers, like every institution. but most of them -- enough of them -- were good. I found more dedicated people in the public schools than I found in private businesses.

I don't work for M$, Google, or Apple but I do work in education. I have to agree with russotto about the Gates Foundation's activities in K-12 and higher education. They pay $30,000 to any academic who publishes papers and articles that are supportive of the Common Core. If this doesn't set off alarm bells about conflicts of interest and corrupting academic practice on a big scale, what kind of alarm bells are you waiting for? Up until he was named and shamed for it, he was also a major donor to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A... - They make Dr. Evil look like a lefty bleeding heart liberal). One of ALEC's core beliefs is in privatising everything, including education and they're doing everything they can to undermine and weaken public education so that corporations have a chance at competing with it.

BTW, Google is now a donor to ALEC. I very much doubt they're getting involved in education to give themselves warm fuzzy altruistic feelings or for any higher purpose. They're currently on a campaign to capture IT services in higher education, taking over email, docs, online storage, etc., AKA "the cloud", and giving them unfettered access to everyone's educational records and web use histories, reliably tied to their identities. They've already been successfully sued in California for spying on students after they said they wouldn't.

Former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education, Diane Ravitch, is a historian of education, an educational policy analyst, and a research professor at New York University's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. She's highly critical of many of the current corporate campaigns in education has some interesting things to say about the Common Core: http://dianeravitch.net/

Ever thumb through the series of books like "What Your Sixth Grader Needs to Know" by now-retired E. D. Hirsch, Jr. to see if your kids were missing anything "big"? With schools in NYC and Chicago rolling out K-12 CS programs starting next Fall, has anyone seen a grade-by-grade proposed syllabus or checklist along these lines showing what's going to be covered at each grade level?. BTW, Hirsch unsurprisingly supports giving Common Core the old college try, although he conceded, "Not even most prescient among us can know whether the Common Core standards will end in triumph or tragedy."

Follow the story link to the Gates Foundation Common Core grants, or check out this post from Diane Ravitch: "The Gates Foundation spent nearly $200 million to pay for the writing, review, evaluation, dissemination, and promotion of the Common Core standards. It is difficult to find a D.C.-based education organization that has not received millions of dollars from the Gates Foundation to promote the standards. Bill Gates believes in the Common Core standards...And he is not at all concerned that the standards were never field-tested, even though Microsoft would never launch a new product line without extensive field-testing."

Diane Ravitch: "The Gates Foundation spent nearly $200 million to pay for the writing, review, evaluation, dissemination, and promotion of the Common Core standards. It is difficult to find a D.C.-based education organization that has not received millions of dollars from the Gates Foundation to promote the standards. Bill Gates believes in the Common Core standards...And he is not at all concerned that the standards were never field-tested, even though Microsoft would never launch a new product line without extensive field-testing."

Please check your facts. I'm sure Illinois has an equivalent to: http://www.cde.ca.gov/fg/fr/sa/cefavgsalaries.asp

Teachers' salaries have plummeted since the late 80's. In california, the average salary is around 68k (up 1% from 2011!) and under 50k for new teachers. This is common knowledge at every california university, so there's a lesson in here somewhere. What I was interested in, is where you get this outrageous number of 75k from? http://dianeravitch.net/2012/09/16/correction-chicago-teacher-salary-average-is-74000/ --- probably something related to this.

It's not about money ether. We originally voted in a 6 cent sales tax that was marketed as money that was supposed to go to our public schools. Once past, the legislature turned around and said the state constitution says ALL REVENUE goes into the general fund. Boise, the best school district in the state, passed it's own tax increase to counter all the budget cuts the State Legislature has put though.

This is being done because the Legislature thinks that Khan Academy can be used to rout the public school system. Nothing more, Nothing less. On the other had, Khan Academy is honestly trying to help, and if they can prove to be a benefit then they will be adopted.

In fact, no.

  I accidentally posted this anonymously farther down, but in fact Bill Gates has done tremendous harm with his so-called "philanthropy"; his real contribution is "leveraged philanthropy", where you use philanthropic donations to control something so that you make more money. This is true with his vaccine so-called "charity" - which forces poor nations to spend money from other sources on expensive foreign vaccines, rather than on development of local vaccine manufacturing or of general public health infrastructure, and thus actually degrades the quality of 3rd world health care while making Bill Gates his "charitable" money back and then some. This is true of his education so-called "charity" - which forces poor school districts to spend money from other sources on high-tech gadgets and expensive consulting services, which are sold by Bill Gates' various partners, but which are actually worse than no services at all.

The Gates' foundation has announced a partnership with Pearson (for profit-education company) to develop and market materials aligned to the common core. These are the materials that your school district must agree to purchase (this particular test cost $32 million state wide) in order to qualify for Race to the Top.
http://articles.nydailynews.com/2012-04-19/news/31369375_1_answer-silly-question-pineapple
    So, Bill Gates is using a small amount of his "charitable" money to force public money in much larger amounts, to be wasted on this crap.

Bill Gates wants to fit teachers with galvanic bracelets:
http://dianeravitch.net/2012/06/09/just-when-you-thought-it-couldnt-get-crazier/

Bill Gates needs vaccines to be a "profit center" for his pharmaceutical buddies. I spelled this out above but read the comments.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2011/11/10/what-bill-gates-says-about-drug-companies-2/

Oh, hey, Bill Gates is using his agricultural charity to force the 3rd world to buy Monsanto's crops:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2010/sep/29/gates-foundation-gm-monsanto