I taught for 10 years at Clarks HS. The first year I was acting principal because they couldn't find anyone with the appropriate credentials. During the last nine years I was a member of the NEA and was appointed by the Clarks chapter of the NEA to negotiate each year. During the next to last year, 1978 IIRC, the school board wanted to fire the art teacher, a wonderful guy, excellent teacher and great talent. He communicated well with the students. His crime? He had shoulder length hair, which was common at the time. I negotiated with the school board over the issue and we finally agreed to let an NEA rep from Lincoln come and settle the matter. The first thing the NEA rep did was to enter into a closed session with the school board, excluding John and myself. After about 30 minutes he came out and announced that John's termination was final. I could have reached that conclusion just by giving up.
What did the NEA rep get in return? A promise by the school board that next year they would adopt the Education 2000 curriculum. That curriculum, and several others like it, included such nice tidbits of disinformation as "dwem"s (dead white European males) who were the cause of all America's problems. It belittled the Constitution, except to accuse our Founding Fathers of stealing the idea from the Five Nations Indian tribes, which didn't have a written language at the time. It consistently confused our Republic with a democracy, barely mentioned the Declaration of Independence except to note that its author was a slave owner, and praised such stalwart Americans as James Baldwin, Paul Robson and other Marxists.
The American public school curriculum has been consistently dumbed down, in increasing tendencies, for the last 30 or more graduating classes. So, it's no surprise that today's graduates, besides not being able to read, write or do math at even a 1950s eighth grade level, do not understand or even know about our form of government, what the three branches are and their respective roles, what the Bill of Rights is and says, and the role Christianity played in the formation of this nation which, contrary to the Left's dogma, was significant. Today's graduate "thinks" that they deserve to be paid even if they don't work and that they have a right to avoid responsibility for their own actions. What they do is always the fault of someone else. Even worse, now they are being given the illusion that they are entitled to government welfare for doing nothing and that they can use their EBT card to buy stuff which can be exchanged on the black market for drugs, porn and booze. And, that they can make unreported income selling drugs. Then they wonder why the Mexican drug cartels are so dangerous and the government doesn't "do something" about it.
They are totally narcissistic and self serving.
I must say, however, that home schooled kids are generally no smarter than the parents who teach them. So, they are either very good, or they are very bad. Most use something like the ACE system. But again, it depends on the qualifications of the parent. In public schools it is (was?) allowed for up to 27% "dislocations", i.e., teachers teaching subject for which they have no formal training. That's how coaches end up teaching chemistry, physics and math, subjects which are shot of trained teachers, and is why there are few HS students in smaller schools that do well in those subjects unless they are self-taught and motivated. Coaches are fired because their teams lose, not because they can't teach.
The best home schooled kids are those whose parents are or were teachers and are trained. Those kids get the best of both worlds. So poorly trained are public high school kids that most home schooled kids, regardless of the training of the parents, out score the HS kids on standardized tests, which themselves have been dumbed down to make recent graduates "appear" to be on par with previous graduates.
/rant
