The Big Scam

I have often heard it said: “If you think that education is expensive, try ignorance.” While I find it impossible to dispute this axiom, I find that education is expensive by design.

I live in the State of Washington. The state spends $7,000.00 per student. Because most school districts do not appear to be able to make ends meet on this paltry sum, they go to the voters every two years and ask for more money. These “Levies” are allowed to supply up to 24% of a school districts budget.

Now, lets see, $7,000.00 a year for a single student translates to $210,000 for the average class of 30, then the schools want to bump the $7,000.00 by 24%, for a total of $9,200.00 or $275,000.00 for a class of thirty. Public schools, by definition, produce students that perform at the 50^th percentile. I home school my children. Home schooled children average between the 80^th and 90^th percentile. It costs less than $1000 to home school a child, K through 12, if you buy the right materials. It costs far less, per child if you have more than one child.¹

But It Is For The Children!

Education activists always tell us that everything they do is for the children, but the money never goes to the children. It always appears to go to the administrators. This, however, is not the biggest scam in education.

Anyone who has been to college has seen it: text books that cost almost $100, written by the professor who requires the book for his class, and no other college or university uses their book. To make matters worse, every few years they update the book by rearranging the chapters, and including different questions or problems. No new content, just change it to make all those used books obsolete.

The same thing goes on in K-12 education. Books are changed, revised and updated just to get the old books out of the system.

When was the last time they changed the meaning of a noun, or a verb? Arithmetic, fractions and algebra have not changed in my life time. I have not heard of a single improvement in math instruction in my life. History needs to be updated to cover that recent history that occurred after the book was published, but the old history books don’t need to be revised except to distort the facts, (to facilitate some social or political agenda).

A good book, once written, will still be a good book for generations to come. I have often wondered why the States didn’t hire people to write good text books, where the states would own the rights to the books. Minor modifications, including error correction, might be made from time to time, but there would be no reason to rewrite text books for K-12 education. The materials required to teach basic skills, such as reading, writing, arithmetic, history and science do not change. Even the basic sciences taught to school age children don’t need to be revised or updated. Newtonian Physics, osmosis and the scientific method are not likely to change for generations, if ever.

We have seen in Real Phonics that some in the education establishment will promote ignorance for financial advantage. The same thing is going on at all levels of education. Education is big business, but nobody dares to suggest that education publishing companies are anything but altruistic, because they wrap themselves in the “but it’s for the children” flag.

Accelerated Achievement has researched scores of text books, and selected the best of the best for inclusion in this product.

[1] Note: It is scientifically invalid to draw conclusions on performance from a self selected group, such as home schooling families, nevertheless, the differences in the cost of materials is valid.