It has been proposed (not by me) that the current administration feels education is unimportant and undermines it. Discuss?

@Insomniac100 I wonder if not "believing" in public schools is really the truth. I follow the news almost obsessively from many sources, and from what I have gleaned, the secretary of education wants to make more options available to more people BECAUSE the public schools are failing right now and that will not be a fast fix. What she wants to do is fix public education, but...in the meantime, after only a year in office with NO time to figure out how to fix it, she wants to fund secular education and home schooling, so that anyone who has a child and actually cares can pull their child from the poo- hole public school they now attend.

@4meAndyou you’re acting like every single household in America can afford 25k a year for a private/charter school or have the time to homeschool their child until they become socially retarded with no friends. I came from a “poo hole” public school and now attend a top 50 university studying pre law. I’m doing just fine and so are my classmates who actually had the opportunity to interact with people in the real world from different backgrounds. It’s laughable to think that Betsy devos remotely cares about public education seeing as she’s proposed hundreds of billions of dollars being cut from public education. She’s never been a teacher, been a county supervisor, sat on a school board, and her along with all her kids have gone to private schools. What makes you think she knows anything about fixing the public school system which remains to be addressed in terms of funding, necessary resources, and outdated programs? She’s the same person that wants to cut federal aid to disadvantaged students that are mentally handicapped and she can’t even tell the difference between educational professioncy vs growth.

@Insomniac100 Home schooling is also an option. If you are pre-law then you had what I call the "Home Advantage". Your parents probably made sure that you completed your homework, kept your grades up, and participated in class. They probably read to you and encouraged you to read. They probably taught you the importance of work, and working.

I went to public school, although private school was an option. My parents were on me every minute like flies on honey and hounded me to my education. Most parents don't put in that effort. When I was not doing homework, I was reading.

Public schools have become poo-holes because we are asking our teachers in public schools, for their tiny salaries, to be both teacher and substitute parent for parents who fall down on the job at home.

The change that is needed is societal, and would be wide and far reaching. In the meantime, we must experiment a little bit to see if our children can receive any sort of better education while their homes fail them. I will watch the segment about Charter Schools. Thank you for the suggestion.

@ImDone Well, Wolfie, it sure sounds nice. BUT if a child comes from a home where the parents are deficient, nothing we do will fix it. Averages will still be dragged down. Kids won't learn, because they need parents to enforce it. Learning isn't always as fun as your cell phone. It is not our schools that are failing...it is our parents.

We can pay teachers 100K a year, which is what they deserve, and they still won't be able to follow 45 kids home and make sure they are all studying and doing their homework, that they are positively reinforced with a work ethic, and that they read extracurricular books to go the extra mile.

@ImDone Well, what do you suggest? Do we have to hire someone to go home with them so they will do their homework? To read to them? To encourage them to work and succeed?

Do we have to hire goons to protect them when their parents physically and verbally abuse them? You can NOT keep a child in school that long, and you can NOT go home with them.

At some point parenting in the United States needs to addressed. If you tried to take over families the violation of freedom would be too onerous for you to condone. And it is a huge error to believe that teachers can become parents to their students.

@ImDone I am using humor to point out that we can't fix this by pumping more money into schools and teachers, because THEY are not the problem.

@ImDone Home schooling is ONE of the options, and let us not be obtuse. It is obvious that parents who can't parent are not going to want to home school.

@ImDone I think your proposal above is VERY well thought out, and I say that we should ALL type it up and send it off to the Secretary of Education.

I would just like to point out that it still does not address some of the reasons that many of our children can not and do not learn. Allow me to explain.

I used to work at a homeless shelter and I worked with pregnant homeless teenage mothers to try to teach them nutrition for their kids. Most of them did NOT want to learn. Slapping a bowl of cereal down in front of their child for all three meals was as much work as they wanted to do. These same mothers will never feed their children enough protein or fruit or vegetables. Their children will not develop properly. Although they will not be technically retarded they will be much less likely to be able to learn. These children almost had to raise themselves, because there was something so severely wrong with their mothers.

Farther up on this question, another respondant mentions ghetto schools, and I think your plan does not address dangerous environments, on the way to school and at home, and does not address drug use. It does not address peer pressure from gangs to do poorly, because kids who are going on to college will not join a gang.

I am not really asking for an answer, here, because I don't know if there is one, but I am simply reinforcing my point that there is a whole separate piece here....the societal failure of inner city families due to things like the Sinaloa drug cartel in Chicago, and a pervading feeling of hopelessness in the parents who live in such environments.

@ImDone That works as far as it goes. I think the federal government needs to take down the cartels operating in the United States before anything can work.

@ImDone I, personally, am not a military or police person, and I would be completely unsuited to take down a drug cartel. It is not my job because I am not capable of doing it, nor are 96% of the populace. We can write letters, but that does not mean we will receive any sort of response.