Homeschool World Forum

[novo4]

I had my dd(9)conferences last night, hopefully the last one! I feel she gave me a good argument for my husband as to why I should homeschool. My dd teacher actually told her that she(dd) needs to put more detail in her answers because when she gets to high school she will only be a number since there are so many kids. The teacher said the teachers only know them really by # and they will not be able to look at her paper and recognize that the name belongs to my dd cute face. I was shocked! I grew up in a small town where my grad class was 56 so this boggles my mind. I knew that my sons class next year in 9th is supposed to top 500, but to be nothing more than a number mortified me.
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Heidi

[Theodore]

Back some years ago, the Powers That Be decided that it would be more cost-effective to centralize the schools. After all, you can save costs by not having to maintain so many schools or teachers, right? As it turns out, however, the extra busing costs made centralized schools just as expensive, and teachers ended up getting their class sizes increased from 25 to 40+, with the end result being less teacher time per student and much worse performance overall. There was an article in Reader's Digest some years ago showing how class size directly correlates to test scores, though some of that might also be from kids having to get up earlier so they can be bused further to school. Waking up too early also correlates to bad test scores and worse health in general.

Bottom line, centralization was a lousy idea, and yes, the worst effect has been ridiculously large class sizes.
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