[dreadgeek]

How good the public schools are in the United States depends upon where you live. Quite literally. We fund our schools based upon property taxes so the higher the property taxes in your neighborhood the better your schools are. This means that wealthy and upper-middle class neighborhoods have good public schools and working class and poor neighborhoods have bad public schools. This also means that rich states have better public schools than poor ones. So Mississippi is a state of largely crappy schools while Massachusetts is a state largely of good schools. (Again, this is not say that EVERY school in MS is bad and EVERY school in MA is good. Rather, I'm saying that the worst school in MA is going to be closer to being on par with the best school in MS while the best school in MS will probably be nowhere near the best school MA)

If that system sounds insane and, in fact, almost exactly the opposite of what one would like to see that's because it is.

Cheers
Aj

Originally Posted by betenoire

Eww, home-schooling. That's all I have to say about that. (Mind you, I only know two people IRL who were home-schooled and they were brothers from my church growing up. So I guess I really have no real yard stick with which to measure homeschooling. But those two boys (I used to hang out with them when I was in 11th and 12th grade) had zero concept about how to function with groups of people and would throw tantrums (seriously!). No sense of what compromise is. No sense of the importance of sharing, even - and that's something you learn in freaking Kindergarten. As far as how they would measure up academically, I have no idea. But I do know that socially they were behind.)

So in the US is it presumed that all public schools are bad, or does it vary depending upon where you live? Because here it doesn't matter if you are from Scarborough, Pickering, or freaking Northbrook - the expectation is that you've graduated highschool with the same tools and you know the same things.