Quote from: JA37 on January 02, 2012, 03:50:47 PM

As for the poor doing well with homeschooling, would you say that that is the norm, or the exception?

Homeschooling is already an exception, so I doubt the question means anything. But within the (self-selecting) homeschooling community itself, success as measured relative to the 'average' is quite high regardless of social class, parental income or racial background. There have only been a few major studies done upon adult homeschoolers, but they all seem to imply that the differences between those catagories are below the margin of error. Said another way, the odds of success in college (and life in general, if measured by income or final educational level attained) for a homeschooled student are both higher and indistingishable regardless of classification or group identity.

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Single moms with three kids genreally don't have time to homeschool their kids. Should we just consider those kids screwed and move on?

Although I can agree that the mom's time is precious, I don't agree that those kids are screwed.

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So your school will admit anyone who shows up at their doorstep, for free?

Not anyone, but some. And yes, for free to the parents. It's called charity, and those who accept it know damn well that they are not entitled to it. I attended a private school that was wholely owned and operated by the local Catholic archdiociese. It was the kind of school that when founded, students there were more likely than not to be children of first generation Irish immigrants. These days, about one in five of the students are children of first generation hispanic immigrants. There is still a convent on the property, although they don't teach anymore and didn't teach when I was there; I did have one class taught by a monk.

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Doesn't sound plausable. That's not a system that will help everyone, just a lucky few.

Lucky few, correct. And they know it and are thankful for it. Some grow up to become truely successful, and repay in kind by donating back to the school even if they are not (or never were) Catholic.

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You have no idea how well virtual schools work, you just assume that it would scale up to any number of participants and somehow be better than how Finland does things?

If you had actually bothered to read what I wrote, I mentioned that I had no idea what the outcome of widespread use of virtual schools would be. I'm sure that if they prove to be wildly successful, it wouldn't be terriblely long before the Finns replicated that success in their own way.

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And did you also see how they manage not only to educate their kids, but also make sure that everyone got properly fed so that they could benefit from the education as well?

School lunch & breakfast programs are widely common here in the US as well, even if they might not be universal. I've never seen a grade school that didn't provide both, and that includes the one that I attended when I attended it back in the 80's. I'm sure that the details vary from state to state, but Finland is pretty small so choose any state program you like and feel free to make comparisons.

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I'm not saying that this is the best way that will ever be when it comes to education, but compared to everything else right now it looks pretty awsome.

Only because you are seeing what they want you to see. It's the unseen that is most troublesome.