"Still, no one knows yet how well any of these tactics will work. A more effective strategy might be to just place students in regular, credit bearing courses and offer extra help, as many vocational schools already do. A more direct, if harsh, strategy would be to simply not admit unprepared students into tertiary education"Remediating the problem you have caused: what a profit center. And only in a system where users have no freedom, no choice, could such malpractice be ongoing and extensive. Remediation helps deal with what the system itself creates.
There won't be any change if the system must police itself and in fact, when they do attempt to ensure accountability, they are so clueless that they start closing schools and spending even larger amounts of money or they throw up their hands and ask corporations to run charters. Of course, none of these actions provides any sort of structural check and balance on system growth. That structural check can only be provided by the families and students themselves.
A direct approach by citizens who complied with compulsory attendance laws and endured 12 years of mind experiments: they could sue for damages. After all, if 12 years of compulsory attendance doesn't enable you to go to college, it is malpractice. (I think that isn't allowed by law, I remember the Kasemans discussing this, but I wouldn't be surprised.)
Compulsory Attendance Disempowers Families
For families and kids, it is all the same thing: attend, watch as they spend your tax dollars on schemes of accountability, and stand aside as they use your kids to prop up the good jobs all along the way: from schools to the central office to the campuses of corporations that provide testing and textbooks. The system cannot reform itself: it is a question of design that removes families entirely.
Elizabeth Warren has written books discussing how families spend more on housing they do not really want or need to get their kids into a a good school system. From a simple compulsory attendance law, that in one fell swoop removed all power from families, to housing issues and corporate charters.
It has been going on so long that corporations and big education now feel quite confident that they can scold families for not doing what they should be doing to provide the schools with the kids they need to make their system work. Kids from well-behaved middle-class homes, can we just provide more of those instead of all these working-class kids and kids in poverty who do not work well with the system as it stands?
I had well-behaved kids on a working-class wage. And I had to work outside the law to homebirth, find on my own breastfeeding resources to avoid the formula pushed on me -- which at least I could do since I didn't have to have a Caesarean from well-schooled doctors, continue breastfeeding unsupported by doctors or my family or community, and I also stayed at home with my kids when they were young to avoid poor-quality and non-existent preschools.
It's as easy as turning off the TV.
background posts
blaming parents, blaming the family
voluntary attendance
make public schools truly publicthe compulsory attendance mindset
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