Homeschooling advocate: public schools all about the Benjamins (OneNewsNow.com)

Homeschooling advocate: public schools all about the Benjamins

Rusty Pugh - One News Now - 7/26/2008 4:10:00 AM

Big Money Spender A home-schooling advocate says a recent case in which half the students in a big city school district failed a test after being provided the answers is just more proof that U.S. public schools have failed miserably at educating students.

The school district of Rochester, New York, provided students and teachers with the questions and answers for a required test for seventh- and eighth-graders. The test covered four subjects: English, math, science, and social studies. Not only did the district deny that there was anything wrong with providing students with the answer key -- but half the students failed the test anyway.

Connie Leech, the district supervisor for secondary schools, informed a local newspaper that issuing the study guides was "probably not in the best judgment," but denied any wrongdoing. She also told the paper: "I'm not concerned that it's a cheat. What we were doing is giving kids a better sense of the knowledge that they needed for the test."

Bruce Shortt is a Dallas-based attorney who has written extensively on the need for a mass exodus from the public schools. He says Leech's comment -- that giving the answers for a test is not cheating -- is typical of the attitude in an institution whose main focus is maintaining the status quo, and advancing students who cannot read or write. He also contends public schools are more focused on making money than educating students.

"I think what is does -- it exposes the underlying truth, which is the public school system is really not primarily about education. It's primarily about maintaining the appearance that they're about education, while really being focused on increasing the cash flow to the special interests that benefit from the system," he argues.

Shortt says test fraud is something that has been an open secret for a very long time. But he says that is because public schools are only interested in maintaining an appearance that students are being educated.

"And so there's this tremendous emphasis on preserving the optics that the system is primarily about educating children," he continues. "But the fact of the matter is, there's very little education going on. Our children are falling farther and farther behind people in other industrialized countries. They're on a trajectory to become the hewers of wood and the drawers of water of the twenty-first century," Shortt maintains.

The home-schooling advoccate accuses the public schools of bleeding the taxpayers dry, and crippling families financially through property taxes. At the same time, he adds, they are failing to educate children, and are indoctrinating them with various kinds of leftist ideology regarding homosexuality, the environment, economics, and gender roles.