Studies now show home schooling produces far superior results than public school.

From the study:

  "Brian Ray, president of the National Home Education Research Institute, compared home schoolers and public school students on the results of three standardized tests — the California Achievement Test, the Iowa Test of Basic Skills and the Stanford Achievement Test — for the 2007-2008 academic year. With public school students at the 50th percentile, home schoolers were at the 89th percentile in reading, the 86th percentile in science, the 84th percentile in language, math, and social studies.

Socio-economic factors may have a lot to do with why home schoolers do so much better. Virtually all have a mother and a father who are living together. Nearly two thirds of fathers and 62 percent of mothers have a bachelor’s degree or higher."

In contrast to that, unions have become so powerful that the public schools are basically run for the benefit of the unions, and the schools themselves, as normal students flee, tend to become focused on kids with dysfunctional backgrounds.

A relative of mine works in a big California school district, and you would blanch at the stories she can tell of the political infighting among administrators who pull down enormous salaries, as well as the amazing problems that her district has to deal with from students coming from broken homes, who can't speak English, or who themselves have some sort of drug problem.

On the front lines, the teachers themselves have to deal with all that, while watching "administrators" battle each other in vicious political games with huge pay as the reward. It's no wonder that the teachers themselves usually send their own kids to private school, if they can. 

In the worst cases imaginable, like this example, one wonders whether the whole idea of public education needs a complete overhaul, separating perhaps the normal kids from intact or involved homes, from those who can't learn, don't want to learn, or who shouldn't be in the country at all.