How Can Tech Help Fight Education Costs?

http101 asks: "With the ever-rising costs of fuel, we seem to forget those that are truly having problems affording it. No, not the homeless, but our own kids. 'Kids,' you ask? Yes, because being driven to school on the 'Yellow Dog' or the 'Edu-Express' better known as a school bus, is costing your state more money than ever before. In my neighborhood, we have a plethora of home connected by fiber and at least high-speed internet. So my question is, how can technology be better-implemented to ensure a student's studies and also lower the costs of fuel for the districts?"

Comments

That's all fine and good, but...

[CausticPuppy]

What makes you think that most parents are qualified to be teachers? In all subjects?

The parents that DO home school their kids probably do so because they know that they are qualified (and probably have some actual classroom teaching experience in the past).

A parent that home schools their child simply for financial reasons, in order to save taxpayer money, may not be giving their child a decent education.
Plus, the school bus will still have to run the same route anyway, using essentially the same fuel, regardless of whether the child is on the bus or not.

Re:That's all fine and good, but...

[AKAImBatman]

What makes you think that most parents are qualified to be teachers? In all subjects?

Nothing. That's why you have to pick a good curriculum. The Beka system I used is often referred to as "Self-Teaching", because most of the teaching is contained within the books, not the parent's head. And if a child cannot understand something (even at a high school level), the explanation is usually more than sufficient for an adult.

That being said, it's always up to the parents to decide if home schooling will work for them. It generally seems to work well for a lot of families, but if you don't feel up to it, check the alternatives. At the very least, there are quite a few private schools that are very affordable. Especially (dare I say it on Slashdot?) schools run by local Churches. Not all of them are so great (I've seen a few I wouldn't be caught dead sending my child to), but there are enough to where you can get your child a good education on a budget.

Plus, the school bus will still have to run the same route anyway, using essentially the same fuel, regardless of whether the child is on the bus or not.

You're forgetting that the route is determined by which children need to be picked up. If the child is near other school children, then your point holds. If the bus actually has to add to its route to pick up the child, then fuel can be saved through each child who home schools.

Re:Graph Theory

[aztec rain god]

Thats what edulog does: http://www.edulog.com/

Re:Correlation

[nido]

I think you misunderstand the problem.

I didn't want to be at school, and I was good at it. My daily refrain for about 4 years was, "do I have to go to school today?" (It ended when I got into a private highschool for the last two years, but even then I only tollerated school). The problem was partially the "f*** ups", as you call them, but I was also bored out of my mind. There were so many things I had to do, that I just didn't care about. It was a total waste of time. The local paper printed my letter last year that ended with, "Can I have my 13 years back, please?

One of your fellow teachers resigned his NYC teaching job with a scathing letter to the Wall Street Journal:

I may be a teacher, but I'm not an educator

From The Wall Street Journal, July 25, 1991
By John Taylor Gatto

I've taught public school for 26 years but I just can't do it anymore. For years I asked the local school board and superintendent to let me teach a curriculum that doesn't hurt kids, but they had other fish to fry. So I'm going to quit, I think.

I've come slowly to understand what it is I really teach: A curriculum of confusion, class position, arbitrary justice, vulgarity, rudeness, disrespect for privacy, indifference to quality, and utter dependency. I teach how to fit into a world I don't want to live in.

I just can't do it anymore. I can't train children to wait to be told what to do; I can't train people to drop what they are doing when a bell sounds; I can't persuade children to feel some justice in their class placement when there isn't any, and I can't persuade children to believe teachers have valuable secrets they can acquire by becoming our disciples. That isn't true.

Government schooling is the most radical adventure in history. It kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by teaching disrespect for home and parents.

An exaggeration? Hardly. Parents aren't meant to participate in our form of schooling, rhetoric to the contrary. My orders as schoolteacher are to make children fit an animal training system, not to help each find his or her personal path.

The whole blueprint of school procedure is Egyptian, not Greek or Roman. It grows from the faith that human value is a scarce thing, represented symbolically by the narrow peak of a pyramid.

That idea passed into American history through the Puritans. It found its "scientific" presentation in the bell curve, along which talent supposedly apportions itself by some Iron Law of biology.

It's a religious idea and school is its church. New York City hires me to be a priest. I offer rituals to keep heresy at bay. I provide documentation to justify the heavenly pyramid.

Socrates foresaw that if teaching became a formal profession something like this would happen. Professional interest is best served by making what is easy to do seem hard; by subordinating laity to priesthood. School has become too vital a jobs project, contract-giver and protector of the social order to allow itself to be "re-formed." It has political allies to guard its marches.

That's why reforms come and go-without changing much. Even reformers can't imagine school much different.

David learns to read at age four; Rachel, at age nine: In normal development, when both are 13, you can,t tell which one learned first -- the five-year spread means nothing at all. But in school I will label Rachel "learning disabled" and slow David down a bit, too.

For a paycheck, I adjust David to depend on me to tell him when to go and stop. He won't outgrow that dependency. I identify Rachel as discount merchandise, "special education." After a few months she'll be locked into her place forever.

In 26 years of teaching rich kids and poor, I almost never met a "learning disabled" child; hardly every met a "gifted and talented" one, either. Like all school categories, these are sacred myths, created by the human imagination. They derive from questionable values we never ex