How to make public school look like home?

This summer throughout the country, from Maui to Colorado to Florida, tens of thousands of teachers and administrators in the public education arena are going to attend conferences to learn the latest research and hear motivational speakers that will bring tears to their eyes, and then go back to schools changed, charged, and ready to go. It's almost like going to church camp. You hear a message that is life changing, you repent of your old teaching methods, and you go back on that high that lasts until about parent conference time.

Interestingly what teachers and administrators are being taught more and more is to make the classroom setting more like a healthy home setting.

From the ASCD blog (Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development) we see the following observation made by experts to help combat the 8th and 9th grade student that is at risk for not graduating:

Solutions mentioned included having small groups of students monitored and encouraged throughout high school by one adult; using data of all types to inform instruction; providing computers and instruction for both students and teachers; and greatly decreasing labeling and tracking of students, including labeling of student groups as "minorities."

So let's see here. We can take the above advice to work with the at-risk student in a modernistic public school setting in loco parenti (in place of the parent), or....we can take out the words "adult" and "students" and replace them with "father" and "brothers" (or "mother" and "sisters"). The mention of the computer is just a PC thing. One simply cannot have a classroom without a computer mind you. Shelves and shelves of great books is wonderful, but the computer.....well, we just won't let our minds go there...it's just too painful. What incentives will we give the good kids if we can't let them play games and blog on "myspace"?

Sorry for the momentary digression into a pet peeve of mine.

Don't tell me that the homeschool parent doesn't know their child inside and out...there is your data, not a nationally norm-referenced test to compare your son/daughter with the rest of the nation. (Oh look! Johnny is smarter than 51.23 percent of the nation in mathematics and 48.32 percent of the nation in language arts!)

As far as labeling and tracking...well those sorts of things came out of a necessity to allow an industrialized production method to educate those that didn't fit in the norm-referenced tests given...more specifically, to create production methods that would allow these anomalies to do better on the tests, thereby validating the worth of the child (in the eyes of the system and society) and of the system itself.

Labeling occurs in the homeschool environment though. The labels are the first or endearing nick- names of the children. As far as minorities are concerned, well there generally has not been a documented case of race segregation in the homeschool system that I know of...certainly not one that required a supreme court ruling in 1954 (Brown) These "labels" are spoken in nurture and in admonishment, but always with the unequaled love and concern of a father and/or mother.

So folks, there you have it! Make the public education system look like the successful homeschool and you will have reform like no other, save of course, real homeschooling.