A couple of comments here: First, those of you who are upset with schools in Texas need to remember that Texas ranks very low among the states in educational achievement - in part because you got to experience NCLB before the rest of us did. But it's a bit out of balance -- let's pick on Louisiana -- to say "the American education system stinks; look at all the students I see" when you're looking at the poorest, or near-poorest, schools in the nation.
Kind of like driving a Pinto and claiming, on that basis, that all American cars are lousy.
Ron, I have a bone to pick with one of your statements specifically:
My own thought(s) on "public education" is that it is really neither public nor is it education. I hold that it is not really public but is rather the private preserve of a class of state-empowered control-freaks who have found a way to escape any significant civic audit, to loot the public treasury and to legally kidnap our children and hold them that way for up to a dozen years while conducting a series of experiments in social conditioning.
Nobody is forcing anybody to send kids to public school. Kids have to be educated, yes. That can happen at home, at fancy prep schools, at private schools, or in public schools. If anybody's kids are "kidnapped" it's because their parents took them to the front steps of the school and signed the enrollment papers. There are alternatives, and 2wins has made sacrifices to see that his kids are educated the way he wants them to be.
Your statement is pure hyperbole.
