Hi Steve,

Yeah, pretty much the public school system is broken. It has, for the past forty years at least, been a failed experiment in social engineering. It started when the Supreme Court misapplied the 14th Amendment to a misinterpretation of the 1st Amendment, banning prayer in public schools. Since then it has gone downhill fast, for a number of reasons that I won't go into right now. But of all those reasons, I think that the most harm has been from the education bureaucrats turning the public school system into their own private gravy train. Maybe it can be fixed, or maybe its too late and the system needs to be scrapped. The question is moot for us, since in either case we have two boys who need educating right now. So we're doing it ourselves.

That's not to say that everyone who goes through the public schools is poorly educated. But as a group homeschooled children perform better than public school graduates. If you plotted the overall academic achievment/performance of kids from public schools, private schools and homeschools you would find three distinct gaussians. There would be plenty of overlap, but the means would be visibly distinct and the order would be homeschool at the highest mean followed by private and then public schools.

There are a lot of theories as to why this is so, and in fact there are a lot of influences producing the effect. But I think the principle reason that homeschooled children do better is because of the lowest possible student to teacher ratio.