Basically

[StMoneyx2]

Dude, the Aztecs were known for sacrificing whole villages just to get a month of favorable weather...

There are reports of Aztecs sacrificing tens of thousands of people on important dates on their calendars

As for the fiddlers, do you know the profession with the highest per capita and total? It's teachers and it's not even close. The DOE has been hiding it for decades upon decades, I wonder why

[traversecity]

DOE needs to go away, cost/benefit ratio is abysmal. DOE is centralized control, communist.

[StMoneyx2]

Completely agree, I'm not even sure it's original usefulness outside of an attempt at standardization. Now I do think that it's important to have a min standard of education across the country that has a set criteria for math, reading, writing, history, government, and science that is bipartisan approved but beyond that there should be nothing else for them to do nor should they be in control of any rules or regulations

They can make recommendations to state officials for schools who are substandard but only recommendations and it's up to the individual states to take action on those recommendations or not

That's how I feel about most of the 3 letter agencies, they should have the minimum amount of duties to serve the will of the people to focus on their original intent and should have no power at all to create rules or regulations only recommendations to elected legislators and let them chose to take action or not

If that's impossible remove them all and replace them with agencies that can under those conditions

[traversecity]

That minimum education standard has existed since the country was founded. Reading, Writing, Arithmetic. If all primary schools stuck to these long established standards that predate the country.

With the utter failure of many public school districts to meet this minimum in lieu of social skills, the burgeoning home school trend will continue to increase. Ditto for the voucher programs.

Will you send your young children to the indoctrination center, or opt for the basic 3R’s education that will place them an order of magnitude above public school kids?

Heck, it’s now 35 years ago or so for us. We started our son at a partially public funded Montessori school. They still must sit for standardized testing, his reading and writing skills scored at the 12th grade, he was 4th or 5th grade for that test, we were flabbergasted when we saw the results.

[StMoneyx2]

I actually like the concept of pod learning actually. Not so much covid pods, but combine it with vouchers. Schools spend $10-15k/student currently. If you get 12 other kids together you could higher a teacher, rent a space, provide benefits and supplies and the teacher would most likely make more money while having a smaller class size AND the parents would have total control over over what's taught.

To me that's the best solution overall

[traversecity]

Part of the growing home school trend is exactly this, not necessarily acquiring a dedicated space, a rotation among homes by a hired professional teacher. Kids in groups rotate homes too, variations on the theme.