What if we just cut through the morass of programs and take all the money being provided at the federal and state level and put it into individual student endowment accounts?
The late 1970's in the United States was a time of surprising deregulation. It was the beginning of the end for the telephone monopolies. Those inside the regulated industries, and the regulatory agencies, warned of doom and disaster if competition were allowed. The doomsayers were wrong. The free market provided solutions that were impossible to forecast. Competition and the profit motive brought out the best that humans can create.
Communications solutions today are employing far more people than the old phone monopolies, and are delivering services never dreamed of in that era. The forecasts of disastrous unemployment and system collapse if the phone monopolies were opened to competition were totally and completely wrong.
K-12 is the phone monopoly of our time
This seems like the best time in years to truly reform K-12. However, the focus seems to be on charter schools, leaving behind thousands of students in poorly performing districts, and most proposed solutions leave out home schooling.
The fundamental problem is the lack of competition. There is a simple way to introduce it.
Instead of pouring money into the local school monopolies, the solution is to simply endow individual students. Open the door to the free market in a meaningful way.
We should create an individual educational endowment fund for each K-12 student. Student endowment funds would pay out annually for students who achieved minimum grade level knowledge, including to the parents of homeschooled students. The determination of minimum achievement would be through testing, with the tests also from free market providers.
Providers for students who did poorly would not be paid, leaving twice the annual amount available next year to educators who could catch them up. Seriously underperforming students would accrue several years of catch-up funding, providing extra incentive for the type of personalized attention that would benefit them. Military veteran servicemen and women teaching small groups of students, developing personal relationships, can change lost kids into enthusiastic young adults.
Opening educational services to the free market will allow for practical job related instruction, and college level courses, to be included as providers fight for market share.
Competition among educational providers will make full use of technology, will provide useful training for actual jobs, and will deliver far more education for the same money. Gamification will keep students involved in ways that existing K-12 material can't touch.
Instead of leaving dropouts to fend for themselves, the funds should remain on deposit indefinitely, allowing those who get their act together after some time in the adult world to get an education.
Modeling the idea will show that existing school structures and transportation fleets will be used, more than with charter schools. Most school systems will continue as they are, but a new element of potential competition will focus their efforts.
A major early effect might be defunding of some inner-city school systems, with the carry-over of endowment funds providing an incentive to corporate providers. These districts are a disgrace, but there is almost no way to change them now. Defunding poor performance in a way that will bring new providers can work.
The new providers will be renting space and transportation for their offerings in most cases from existing school districts. Just as with telecom deregulation, it will take several years to see the full impact, but requiring minimum accomplishment for payout will protect students and taxpayers as solutions evolve.
Home schooling pods will explode, but those kids will still participate on local sports teams, and transportation to practice (and back) will also be rented from existing fleets by their parents.
Special needs students would still have the extra funding, but at an individual student level.
Let's end the monopoly. Let’s open the door to competition.
Unleash technology, but pay only for results.
Homeschoolers would be an unstoppable force for reform if a realistic plan to pay them existed. The endowment idea would do it.
I am Richard Illyes, a retired electronic designer and programmer in rural Texas south of Houston. I am an active pilot and flight instructor and fly off my grass strip at my place outside Alvin, where I have a small herd of cows and a flock of chickens. My life experience includes decades as a small business owner, father and grandfather, and Army tank crewman and tank commander.
In the Before Times, parents knew little of the content, and very little of the teachers' mastery of their subjects. A good number of parents were likely disappointed to shocked about how little of value their kids were learning when schools went virtual. A parent does not have to be a great teacher or even that much of a subject matter expert to be a better instructor than many of the "professional educators". And of course, parents have much more invested in their kids than teachers do.
It's really not that surprising that many parents would decide that they could do at least as good a job educating their kids as a public school.
I’m still surprised how little public schools pay to personal finance. It’s so bad that the cynic in me believes this is by design. How can we still have young adults graduating from high school that don’t know what an interest rate is. Banks are to eager to sign up these new generations to lives of perpetual debt.
In the early 2000s I was doing some consulting work with a science museum associated with a major university in the northeast. Their head of Education -- the guy responsible for working with the local schools -- was homeschooling his daughter. I found this interesting: not only did it seem contradictory, but the fellow himself was neither a hippie nor an evangelical. He worked in education! So I asked him why. He said he didn't like the way the schools taught science: they didn't teach enough, and what they did teach was watered down and/or wrong.
Ten years later I was working at a science museum on the campus of a major university in the Midwest. We were going through a strategic plan, revamping all of our programs. On several occasions I encouraged our Education Dept. to address homeschooling, which was already growing in our state at that time. The department head completely refused. She only wanted to work with public schools -- she even dismissed the privates -- and said homeschoolers could attend programs for the general public.
What a glowing and optimistic report of homeschooling, an institution that puts on a good face, and has the support of powerful legal advocates who insist that there can be no homeschooling accountability. Yes, families are buying a lot of materials. But will they use them? This article highlights several families with highly educated parents....what about families where the parents have nothing more than a high school diploma, if that? These unschooling children who are doing farm work....are they going to grow up to be farmers? Are they getting in education in modern farming, or doing something that is more like a hobby? If you are going to cover this, cover the dark side of it too. Let's not pretend that everything is sunshine and roses when it comes to homeschooling. One of the families in this very article has two full time working parents. How are they possibly going to commit the time to homeschooling over the long term?
I was homeschooled from age 4 until age 14. I remember doing flash cards in my living room, and learning to read from the Bible. My mom spend a lot of money on new curriculum every year, and I did worksheets, learned phonics, cursive and how to add and subtract. And somewhere around maybe 4th or 5th grade, I couldn't tell you, we just stopped doing any school work. I do literally mean any school work. I spent at least 5 years doing no math, no assigned reading, no science, history, writing or anything of the sort. My parents worked too, and I would play video games while they were gone. My sister and I would eat ice cream for breakfast, and then it was video games until network TV switched from boring soap operas to sitcoms at 12 pm, and when my mom got home we would rush to start the laundry and the dishes she had asked us to work on while she was gone. She reported quarterly to the state that we were doing 5 hours of school each day, and literally made up grades. I got high scores on standardized tests for reading because I loved to read, and would read anything I could get my hands on, but no one ever inquired why my math scores were near the bottom of the percentiles. I knew a family who decided to homeschool because they couldn't get their children to school on time. Another family believed that a woman's place is at home, and that a girl didn't need any formal education beyond 6th grade. For them, cooking and sewing were "math." The truth is that homeschooling can allow families not to take education seriously, and make up their own ideas of what education is. This is perfectly legal, and if a child turns 18 and has been denied an education by their parents, they have no legal recourse. There is no K-12 catch-up program for young adults with irresponsible homeschooling parents.
Homeschooling, when done well, can provide a personalized learning program for children that can allow them to accelerate far past grade level, and gain both independence and confidence that will serve them well through college, and beyond into the adult workforce. But make no mistake that there are children right now being denied an education by parents who do not prioritize or value learning and knowledge. No one knows how many, because there is no accountability on this issue. Every single homeschooling parent you ever speak to will criticize the school system, and talk about how homeschooling is superior and how socialization is over rated. Why don't you go out and interview the children of the 70s and 80s who were homeschooled, and ask what they think about it?
I was homeschooled for 4 years in the 80s, Abeka curriculum which you may be familiar with. I was a bit unprepared for high school math only, a “handicap” I overcame in pursuing my engineering degrees. I was appalled at COVID required Canvas platform based online elementary and middle schooling. It was a mess, very difficult to determine what work was due when for all the different classes (which each teacher set up differently). Versus my homeschool experience - simple list of assignments for the day which I did at my own pace with virtually no supervision.
But I do see your point as to accountability - some students may get poor education though no fault of their own.
The way schools handled online school during the Covid shutdowns certainly had a great deal of room for improvement. I'm not here to argue that there were not problems, or that there are not generally problems with public schooling. But if you had a good homeschooling experience, it is because you were either lucky enough to have parents who made that happen or you were self motivated enough to do it yourself. It is absolutely true that some kids do learn what they need in order to be prepared for live, but many kids do not. ABeka is pretty good as a curriculum, particularly in grammar instruction. But not all kids can or should be expected to work without supervision.
I've taught in public school and homeschooled. We need both. I homeschooled because I have the ability to do so and avoid the negative pop culture that pervades higher grades. My kids did participate in sports at the high school, and music programs. It took a lot of work and effort to provide opportunities to socialize. The homeschoolers we know are different. They're doing pretty well. I know people whose kids went to the local public school and they're doing well. It's very complex and individual.
To say schools are failing, teachers are failing is simplistic thinking. Schools, teachers and students don't come in isolation from society.
The Amish do a better job in a teaching those in their community to be productive citizens than the Public Education system. They do it in a one-room schoolhouse till the 8th grade. What they learn is what they essentially need, and that is a set of values. They learn honesty, self-control, compassion. The goal is to live a simple life in a community that shuns pride, individualism (family is advocated), self-indulgence.
I stand by values in "Six Pillars of Character". They are secular and would be good for corporations to adopt; they are: Respect, Caring, Citizenship, Trustworthy, Responsibility, and Fairness. Public schools have no values, and the community does not advocate these. Companies like Google value safety. Safety is not a behavior; it is a goal. You can be safe by being a coward. Why don't they advocate being a good citizen upholding individual rights and free will?."
We should create an educational endowments for each K-12 student. Student endowment funds would pay out for students who achieved grade level knowledge.
Instead of endless fights over charter schools, home schooling, etc. etc., all students would become customers for educational services and be treated accordingly.
Providers for students who did poorly would not be paid, leaving twice the annual amount available next year to educators who could catch them up.
Instead of leaving dropouts to fend for themselves, the funds would remain on deposit indefinitely, allowing those who got their act together after some time in the adult world to get an education.
Troubled students would have teachers and mentors who had a financial stake in the outcome. The dramatic difference in quality based on differences in community income levels would end.
Homeschoolers tend to spend time around people of many different ages, and can interact with kids of all ages. The schoolers tend to classify kids by age or grade and only interact with the correct group. Schoolers also don’t interact with adults in the same way. I would say homeschoolers tend to view adults as having experience and expertise that might be useful to know about, whereas schoolers view adults as annoying authority figures they don’t trust or find interesting.
Bari - thank you for supporting these guest posts !!!
Suzy - what a solid article. You might be missing special needs kids. The autistic, the hyper, the kids who are fine intelligence wise, but don't do well sitting still, and dealing with the noise or smells or slow speed of the lowest common denominator that classrooms require.
My spouse has a FB forum for moms of those kids. Some moms are able to handle their whacky kids, for others who work outside of the house, they're stuck in a lose lose situation, where their school is hard for the sensory issued kids - masking is torture - and home is hard for the parent caregiver.
Excellent writing Suzy, and encouraging to anyone whose children’s future as free thinkers is threatened by the devolution and collapse of public education. (And watch out for counter-measures from the Feds and progressive-state boards of Ed).
Please continue to keep a spotlight on alternatives.
One part of the ecosystem is standardized testing of college readiness for those educated outside the US public school madrassa. See Classic Learning Test which upholds standards, encourages critical thinking, and whose founder Jeremy Tate co-wrote with Cornell West the fine recent op-ed opposing Howard U’s reactionary elimination of its classics department.
With the 14-year old girl gender dysphoria craze going on, I'd be reluctant to send a kid to public school in a state like Washington where they will take your child away from you if you find out what they're doing medically to your child and then object.
When your public school comes to me with an appeal for a tax levy to pay for tomorrow's engineers and scientists, I think, I'm an engineer and from what I see tomorrow's engineers and scientists are being trained by schools in Bangalore, India. My school is training tomorrow's social society planners and redistributers. I should pay for gold-plated services and facilities for that result? I think not.
Well written Suzy. My kids both went 100% through the public school system here in Sonoma County, CA. Both went on to the UC system, UCLA and UC Santa Cruz. Fortunately both went to high school in the first part of this century, but were part of the “participation trophy” generation. At the time I told those guys it was a joke and was bullshit to be rewarded for mediocrity, minimum effort; and your success isn’t going to be judged by how you did in some soccer league you were half-hearted about to begin with, you’re playing soccer because your pals are, and that’s good. But you don’t need a valueless trophy like that I’d tell them. Kick ass with your grades and create the lives you want for yourselves - I’ll support your decisions, it’s your life - I followed my interests you follow yours.
They both rocked it in the UC system and are hard working contributors to society. They’ve enjoyed the successes they’ve had to-date because they worked steadily for them and have seen the trade offs.
How will this boom affect the trend away from standardized testing? Without them, how else will universities and colleges be able to evaluate the preparedness of homeschoolers being graded by their parents or independent teachers?
What if we just cut through the morass of programs and take all the money being provided at the federal and state level and put it into individual student endowment accounts?
The late 1970's in the United States was a time of surprising deregulation. It was the beginning of the end for the telephone monopolies. Those inside the regulated industries, and the regulatory agencies, warned of doom and disaster if competition were allowed. The doomsayers were wrong. The free market provided solutions that were impossible to forecast. Competition and the profit motive brought out the best that humans can create.
Communications solutions today are employing far more people than the old phone monopolies, and are delivering services never dreamed of in that era. The forecasts of disastrous unemployment and system collapse if the phone monopolies were opened to competition were totally and completely wrong.
K-12 is the phone monopoly of our time
This seems like the best time in years to truly reform K-12. However, the focus seems to be on charter schools, leaving behind thousands of students in poorly performing districts, and most proposed solutions leave out home schooling.
The fundamental problem is the lack of competition. There is a simple way to introduce it.
Instead of pouring money into the local school monopolies, the solution is to simply endow individual students. Open the door to the free market in a meaningful way.
We should create an individual educational endowment fund for each K-12 student. Student endowment funds would pay out annually for students who achieved minimum grade level knowledge, including to the parents of homeschooled students. The determination of minimum achievement would be through testing, with the tests also from free market providers.
Providers for students who did poorly would not be paid, leaving twice the annual amount available next year to educators who could catch them up. Seriously underperforming students would accrue several years of catch-up funding, providing extra incentive for the type of personalized attention that would benefit them. Military veteran servicemen and women teaching small groups of students, developing personal relationships, can change lost kids into enthusiastic young adults.
Opening educational services to the free market will allow for practical job related instruction, and college level courses, to be included as providers fight for market share.
Competition among educational providers will make full use of technology, will provide useful training for actual jobs, and will deliver far more education for the same money. Gamification will keep students involved in ways that existing K-12 material can't touch.
Instead of leaving dropouts to fend for themselves, the funds should remain on deposit indefinitely, allowing those who get their act together after some time in the adult world to get an education.
Modeling the idea will show that existing school structures and transportation fleets will be used, more than with charter schools. Most school systems will continue as they are, but a new element of potential competition will focus their efforts.
A major early effect might be defunding of some inner-city school systems, with the carry-over of endowment funds providing an incentive to corporate providers. These districts are a disgrace, but there is almost no way to change them now. Defunding poor performance in a way that will bring new providers can work.
The new providers will be renting space and transportation for their offerings in most cases from existing school districts. Just as with telecom deregulation, it will take several years to see the full impact, but requiring minimum accomplishment for payout will protect students and taxpayers as solutions evolve.
Home schooling pods will explode, but those kids will still participate on local sports teams, and transportation to practice (and back) will also be rented from existing fleets by their parents.
Special needs students would still have the extra funding, but at an individual student level.
Let's end the monopoly. Let’s open the door to competition.
Unleash technology, but pay only for results.
Homeschoolers would be an unstoppable force for reform if a realistic plan to pay them existed. The endowment idea would do it.
I am Richard Illyes, a retired electronic designer and programmer in rural Texas south of Houston. I am an active pilot and flight instructor and fly off my grass strip at my place outside Alvin, where I have a small herd of cows and a flock of chickens. My life experience includes decades as a small business owner, father and grandfather, and Army tank crewman and tank commander.
7272 CR 168 Alvin TX 77511
314-406-1654
Nice to meet You, Richard Illyes. I like it. IMO, if it's got a shot, it'll be with the Repubs. ICBW.
But I'm afraid Your ideas are TOO good to get a fair hearing. Never say never, of course.
As a homeschooler my fear is that of cross sectional area. More homeschoolers, bigger target. Regulators gotta regulate.
In the Before Times, parents knew little of the content, and very little of the teachers' mastery of their subjects. A good number of parents were likely disappointed to shocked about how little of value their kids were learning when schools went virtual. A parent does not have to be a great teacher or even that much of a subject matter expert to be a better instructor than many of the "professional educators". And of course, parents have much more invested in their kids than teachers do.
It's really not that surprising that many parents would decide that they could do at least as good a job educating their kids as a public school.
I’m still surprised how little public schools pay to personal finance. It’s so bad that the cynic in me believes this is by design. How can we still have young adults graduating from high school that don’t know what an interest rate is. Banks are to eager to sign up these new generations to lives of perpetual debt.
In the early 2000s I was doing some consulting work with a science museum associated with a major university in the northeast. Their head of Education -- the guy responsible for working with the local schools -- was homeschooling his daughter. I found this interesting: not only did it seem contradictory, but the fellow himself was neither a hippie nor an evangelical. He worked in education! So I asked him why. He said he didn't like the way the schools taught science: they didn't teach enough, and what they did teach was watered down and/or wrong.
Ten years later I was working at a science museum on the campus of a major university in the Midwest. We were going through a strategic plan, revamping all of our programs. On several occasions I encouraged our Education Dept. to address homeschooling, which was already growing in our state at that time. The department head completely refused. She only wanted to work with public schools -- she even dismissed the privates -- and said homeschoolers could attend programs for the general public.
There is an error in the essay: Common Core was part of Obama's "Race to the Top", not Bush's "No Child Left Behind".
What a glowing and optimistic report of homeschooling, an institution that puts on a good face, and has the support of powerful legal advocates who insist that there can be no homeschooling accountability. Yes, families are buying a lot of materials. But will they use them? This article highlights several families with highly educated parents....what about families where the parents have nothing more than a high school diploma, if that? These unschooling children who are doing farm work....are they going to grow up to be farmers? Are they getting in education in modern farming, or doing something that is more like a hobby? If you are going to cover this, cover the dark side of it too. Let's not pretend that everything is sunshine and roses when it comes to homeschooling. One of the families in this very article has two full time working parents. How are they possibly going to commit the time to homeschooling over the long term?
I was homeschooled from age 4 until age 14. I remember doing flash cards in my living room, and learning to read from the Bible. My mom spend a lot of money on new curriculum every year, and I did worksheets, learned phonics, cursive and how to add and subtract. And somewhere around maybe 4th or 5th grade, I couldn't tell you, we just stopped doing any school work. I do literally mean any school work. I spent at least 5 years doing no math, no assigned reading, no science, history, writing or anything of the sort. My parents worked too, and I would play video games while they were gone. My sister and I would eat ice cream for breakfast, and then it was video games until network TV switched from boring soap operas to sitcoms at 12 pm, and when my mom got home we would rush to start the laundry and the dishes she had asked us to work on while she was gone. She reported quarterly to the state that we were doing 5 hours of school each day, and literally made up grades. I got high scores on standardized tests for reading because I loved to read, and would read anything I could get my hands on, but no one ever inquired why my math scores were near the bottom of the percentiles. I knew a family who decided to homeschool because they couldn't get their children to school on time. Another family believed that a woman's place is at home, and that a girl didn't need any formal education beyond 6th grade. For them, cooking and sewing were "math." The truth is that homeschooling can allow families not to take education seriously, and make up their own ideas of what education is. This is perfectly legal, and if a child turns 18 and has been denied an education by their parents, they have no legal recourse. There is no K-12 catch-up program for young adults with irresponsible homeschooling parents.
Homeschooling, when done well, can provide a personalized learning program for children that can allow them to accelerate far past grade level, and gain both independence and confidence that will serve them well through college, and beyond into the adult workforce. But make no mistake that there are children right now being denied an education by parents who do not prioritize or value learning and knowledge. No one knows how many, because there is no accountability on this issue. Every single homeschooling parent you ever speak to will criticize the school system, and talk about how homeschooling is superior and how socialization is over rated. Why don't you go out and interview the children of the 70s and 80s who were homeschooled, and ask what they think about it?
I was homeschooled for 4 years in the 80s, Abeka curriculum which you may be familiar with. I was a bit unprepared for high school math only, a “handicap” I overcame in pursuing my engineering degrees. I was appalled at COVID required Canvas platform based online elementary and middle schooling. It was a mess, very difficult to determine what work was due when for all the different classes (which each teacher set up differently). Versus my homeschool experience - simple list of assignments for the day which I did at my own pace with virtually no supervision.
But I do see your point as to accountability - some students may get poor education though no fault of their own.
The way schools handled online school during the Covid shutdowns certainly had a great deal of room for improvement. I'm not here to argue that there were not problems, or that there are not generally problems with public schooling. But if you had a good homeschooling experience, it is because you were either lucky enough to have parents who made that happen or you were self motivated enough to do it yourself. It is absolutely true that some kids do learn what they need in order to be prepared for live, but many kids do not. ABeka is pretty good as a curriculum, particularly in grammar instruction. But not all kids can or should be expected to work without supervision.
I've taught in public school and homeschooled. We need both. I homeschooled because I have the ability to do so and avoid the negative pop culture that pervades higher grades. My kids did participate in sports at the high school, and music programs. It took a lot of work and effort to provide opportunities to socialize. The homeschoolers we know are different. They're doing pretty well. I know people whose kids went to the local public school and they're doing well. It's very complex and individual.
To say schools are failing, teachers are failing is simplistic thinking. Schools, teachers and students don't come in isolation from society.
The Amish do a better job in a teaching those in their community to be productive citizens than the Public Education system. They do it in a one-room schoolhouse till the 8th grade. What they learn is what they essentially need, and that is a set of values. They learn honesty, self-control, compassion. The goal is to live a simple life in a community that shuns pride, individualism (family is advocated), self-indulgence.
I stand by values in "Six Pillars of Character". They are secular and would be good for corporations to adopt; they are: Respect, Caring, Citizenship, Trustworthy, Responsibility, and Fairness. Public schools have no values, and the community does not advocate these. Companies like Google value safety. Safety is not a behavior; it is a goal. You can be safe by being a coward. Why don't they advocate being a good citizen upholding individual rights and free will?."
We should create an educational endowments for each K-12 student. Student endowment funds would pay out for students who achieved grade level knowledge.
Instead of endless fights over charter schools, home schooling, etc. etc., all students would become customers for educational services and be treated accordingly.
Providers for students who did poorly would not be paid, leaving twice the annual amount available next year to educators who could catch them up.
Instead of leaving dropouts to fend for themselves, the funds would remain on deposit indefinitely, allowing those who got their act together after some time in the adult world to get an education.
Troubled students would have teachers and mentors who had a financial stake in the outcome. The dramatic difference in quality based on differences in community income levels would end.
Let's move to a free market.
Homeschoolers tend to spend time around people of many different ages, and can interact with kids of all ages. The schoolers tend to classify kids by age or grade and only interact with the correct group. Schoolers also don’t interact with adults in the same way. I would say homeschoolers tend to view adults as having experience and expertise that might be useful to know about, whereas schoolers view adults as annoying authority figures they don’t trust or find interesting.
Bari - thank you for supporting these guest posts !!!
Suzy - what a solid article. You might be missing special needs kids. The autistic, the hyper, the kids who are fine intelligence wise, but don't do well sitting still, and dealing with the noise or smells or slow speed of the lowest common denominator that classrooms require.
My spouse has a FB forum for moms of those kids. Some moms are able to handle their whacky kids, for others who work outside of the house, they're stuck in a lose lose situation, where their school is hard for the sensory issued kids - masking is torture - and home is hard for the parent caregiver.
Excellent writing Suzy, and encouraging to anyone whose children’s future as free thinkers is threatened by the devolution and collapse of public education. (And watch out for counter-measures from the Feds and progressive-state boards of Ed).
Please continue to keep a spotlight on alternatives.
One part of the ecosystem is standardized testing of college readiness for those educated outside the US public school madrassa. See Classic Learning Test which upholds standards, encourages critical thinking, and whose founder Jeremy Tate co-wrote with Cornell West the fine recent op-ed opposing Howard U’s reactionary elimination of its classics department.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/04/19/cornel-west-howard-classics/
With the 14-year old girl gender dysphoria craze going on, I'd be reluctant to send a kid to public school in a state like Washington where they will take your child away from you if you find out what they're doing medically to your child and then object.
When your public school comes to me with an appeal for a tax levy to pay for tomorrow's engineers and scientists, I think, I'm an engineer and from what I see tomorrow's engineers and scientists are being trained by schools in Bangalore, India. My school is training tomorrow's social society planners and redistributers. I should pay for gold-plated services and facilities for that result? I think not.
Well written Suzy. My kids both went 100% through the public school system here in Sonoma County, CA. Both went on to the UC system, UCLA and UC Santa Cruz. Fortunately both went to high school in the first part of this century, but were part of the “participation trophy” generation. At the time I told those guys it was a joke and was bullshit to be rewarded for mediocrity, minimum effort; and your success isn’t going to be judged by how you did in some soccer league you were half-hearted about to begin with, you’re playing soccer because your pals are, and that’s good. But you don’t need a valueless trophy like that I’d tell them. Kick ass with your grades and create the lives you want for yourselves - I’ll support your decisions, it’s your life - I followed my interests you follow yours.
They both rocked it in the UC system and are hard working contributors to society. They’ve enjoyed the successes they’ve had to-date because they worked steadily for them and have seen the trade offs.
How will this boom affect the trend away from standardized testing? Without them, how else will universities and colleges be able to evaluate the preparedness of homeschoolers being graded by their parents or independent teachers?