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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsNorth Carolina Home Schools to Get Public School Money
In July, the increasingly right-wing legislature in North Carolina passed a bill to divert $10 million from the public school budget to create vouchers that would give low-income students up to $4,200 a year to pay for private school tuition. Such vouchers are a popular conservative proposal for "reforming" failing public schools.
North Carolina's vouchers, which will become available in 2014, allow public money to go to unregulated private schools that are not required to meet any educational or teacher preparation standards. In addition, thanks to the way the law was written, the money will be available to "home schools"literally schools set up in someone's house. Homeschooling traditionally has been done by parents. But the state recently changed its home schooling law to allow people who aren't parents or legal guardians educate kids in a group setting. The only requirement for such schools is that the teacher have a high school diploma, that the school keep immunization and attendance records on its students, and that it give kids a national standardized test every year.
NC Policy Watch, a project of the nonprofit North Carolina Justice Center, went out and found some interesting "home schools" that may be eligible for taxpayer funding next year. The Paramount Christian Academy has one teacher who teaches her granddaughter, a neighbor's kid, and one special-needs student. It uses textbooks from Bob Jones University and A Beka Book, whose offerings we've chronicled here at Mother Jones.
As Deanna Pan explained last year, such instructional materials teach Bible-based "facts"such as the existence of the Loch Ness Monster. The materials also suggest that the Ku Klux Klan "tried to be a means of reform, fighting the decline in morality and using the symbol of the cross" and that dinosaurs and humans lived at the same time, for instance. Gay people are singled out for special scorn in one Bob Jones teachers' guide, which says that they "have no more claims to special rights than child molesters or rapists." And math hatersthese books are for you. The company writes on its website:
Unlike the 'modern math' theorists, who believe that mathematics is a creation of man and thus arbitrary and relative, A Beka Book teaches that the laws of mathematics are a creation of God and thus absolute
A Beka Book provides attractive, legible, and workable traditional mathematics texts that are not burdened with modern theories such as set theory.
Continued at Link: http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/12/north-carolina-home-schools-public-vouchers
For those wondering if the homework examples you've seen on Facebook that show kids being taught that humans rode dinosaurs were real, they definitely are. They're in the books mentioned in this article. I will post another article with 14 of the most insane examples of taught stupidity on another thread.
RC
(25,592 posts)On one side we have militarized police using war tactics on innocent people in their homes and the other we have the dumbing down of our education system, so far they teach religious non-sense and fairy tails as fact.
How much will we take before we wake up and push back?
freshwest
(53,661 posts)FDR is spinning in his grave.
The school is the last expenditure upon which America should be willing to economize.
~Franklin D. Roosevelt
FDR's WPA built PUBLIC schools that taught science, vocation and liberal arts.
The generation the GOP make through this process will never be able to interact with the rest of America nor the world at large as they will be scientific illiterates. They will be full of pride in knowing little, hating others and superstition.
The perfect peasant. This is devolution.