Questions for Your Local School Board

Should public schools offer knowledge, skills and factual information or feelings, attitudes, opinion-shaping and social engineering?

Should students learn "fuzzy" math (math appreciation) or real math – you know, facts? (Fuzzy math programs have various names, such as Everyday Math, Constructivist Math, and more) From www.wgquirk.com: "Constructivist math educators want easy, stress-free math, so they reject memorization and practice and thereby severely limit the student's ability to remember specific math facts and skills. Without specific remembered knowledge, students must regularly revisit shallow content and rely on general content-independent skills, such as "draw a picture" or 'make a list'."


Should children learn to guess at words ("look-say, "Whole Language") or should they learn how to read words accurately with Phonics? "Whole Language is the great deception being perpetrated by the professional educators upon the children of America, all of whom want to be taught to read but are being turned into reading cripples condemned to lives of frustration, academic failure, stunted intellectual growth and destroyed ambition."

Are science, history, spelling, geography taught to all, or just some?

Why is special ed so huge? When statistics show that less than one percent of children are truly "disabled" in any way, why are over ten percent of public school children considered so? The true answer is that the schools use a "bounty system" for special ed. The state sends extra money for every child who is diagnosed with a "disability" no matter how flimsy the diagnosis.

Should the teachers offer information, or do we merely want employees to be “facilitators” who hope that our children “share” with each other what little they know?

Why are honor rolls bloated while test scores are poor? Can it really be for public relations reasons?

Who, on the board, is guarding against school corruption? Raise your hands, please.

Why are there no Gifted and Talented classes? The real reason is that the state is not trying to help the gifted and talented, but simply to create a middle mass of mediocrity that will become a workforce in service of government and industry.

Health comes from nutrition and exercise, but the schools offer junk-food-for-profit and no recess – Why?

If money is related to school quality, why has school quality declined in recent years when education spending has risen at rates well above inflation?

Why do private schools not require their teachers to be "certified" as public schools do? The fact is that private school teachers (generally people with degrees in academic studies) are insulted by (and refuse to take) the low intellectual quality of the courses required to become "certified."