I'm curious Sue, do you have any home or otherwise schooled kids?

The question I have is, where the hell was the parent? The 6yo should have been supervised and informed of the right and wrong places to take the knife. And the child should be taking nothing to school that the parent doesn't know about.

Also, while it is easy to blame the school/teacher/administration you have to remember that they are downstream of hundreds of children that come at them like a dam break. Kids from diverse backgrounds, often with learning disabilities, or discipline issues. The teachers can't handle each and every one of them like the bundle of joy their parents see. If little Johnny innocently pulls out a knife and little Sue stumbles into it and gets so much as a scratch your talking multi-million dollar lawsuit. Schools are run on a shoestring and any case can sink their budget. So the rules are written in simple bright lines. It also limits claims of favoritism, racism, special treatment.

If it can be mistaken for a weapon or even moderately controversial or dangerous it is forbidden. I bet the 45 day suspension is the proscribed penalty. More a punishment for the parent than child. Forty-five days was probably selected to keep it beyond the easy, no pain, reach of a parent who might otherwise try to take it in stride, avoid having to make provisions for daycare, by taking a few days off. A kid being kicked for three days or a week is a vacation. A kid having to be put into daycare so mommy can go to work is a wake up call.

I also give you odds that there is a fairly lenient appeals process. The 45 days is a threat to get the parent to get involved and engaged. The usual way it works is the 45 days suspension becomes a week or less if the parent meets with the school counselor, agrees to parenting classes, and consents to monthly in-person meeting for a year to make sure the kid maintains course in the right direction.

These zero tolerance policies seem to be leaving US children's educational standards well behind other countries in the world league tables.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3zjbnHphxE

From MSNBC.Com
"However, on Tuesday night the school board made a hasty change to its code of conduct. The seven-member board voted unanimously to reduce the punishment for kindergartners and first-graders who bring weapons to school or commit other violent offenses to a suspension ranging from three to five days. "

Full article here.

"I'm curious Sue, do you have any home or otherwise schooled kids?"

I shudder at the thought of ever having children. I've made it a point to never let myself get in that position. (Ask some of the long-timers here if my having children seems like a good idea.. I KNOW what the answers will be.)

I started school in 1955, the same year Rudolf Flesch's book Why Johnny Can't Read came out. I spent twelve years in the public school system, the last half wondering why it seemed to totally insane.

When I read John Taylor Gatto's book Dumbing Us Down several years ago, I was shocked at all the parallels between the what I had seen/experienced, and his explanation of the why of it. All through this book I was thinking, "Yes! I remember them doing that!" and "YES! I always wondered why they did that!" and so forth.

We have been one of the richest and most influential countries of the world for a good, long time now, yet we have the poorest educational system in the industrialized world. Rock bottom, dead last. But I guess that ignorant people are easier to control than educated ones. And it seems to be working just fine, doesn't it?

Sue

I have the time and money available so home school and private school are options but I also have the option of utilizing some of the best public school systems in the nation. When my first child was approaching school age I had several very candid conversations with people I trust for advice on this particular subject. One of these councilors is a family member that recently retired after a number of years as the Dean of the doctoral education program at a well regarded private university. His years prior to that were spent as a teacher, coach, principal and as a distinguished professor of education in the doctoral program at the same university. His advice was to utilize the public school system in my area. If I weren't in one of the small elite public school systems in the area I suspect his advice may have been different.

Now, with that said, I will admit that the options and tools available to home schoolers have changed significantly since my oldest started school. Home schooling would give my public school option a much better run for it's money today.

IMO any of these options could be the right decision based on the particulars of public and private education in your area and the particular needs and desires of the children involved. I have seen HUGE train wrecks with kids in public, private and home school. The key to all of these is constant, thoughtful parental involvement regardless of which option you choose.

Another question, does anyone know where the authors Sue mentioned went to school?

Per Wikipedia:

Rudolf Flesch: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Flesch

"He was raised in Austria and finished university there..."

John Taylor Gatto: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_Gatto

"In his youth he attended public schools throughout the Pittsburgh Metro Area including Swissvale, Monongahela, and Uniontown as well as a Catholic boarding school in Latrobe... He was named New York City Teacher of the year in 1989, 1990, and 1991, and New York State Teacher of the Year in 1991... One professor of education has called his books 'scathing' and 'one-sided and hyperbolic, [but] not inaccurate.'"

Interesting that both the writers in question attended and apparently received good enough educations at public schools to write books condemning public education.

I'm reminded of talk show host Dennis Prager, who at one time reminded his listeners how educated he was at least once per show who after being released from his job at the major talk radio station in Los Angeles in later years became one of the more vociferous "anti-intellectual" proponents I've ever heard on the radio.

I'm also reminded of a local Los Angeles writer and editor who only after they were fired by the Los Angeles Times came out condemning the paper for it's editorial positions. Apparently while she was taking their money all was well.

"Interesting that both the writers in question attended and apparently received good enough educations at public schools to write books condemning public education."

Flesch was educated in Europe... no comparison. By the time a French or German kid is six years old, you can hand him/her a book of any kind and they can read it. They won't know what all the words mean, but they CAN read it. Not so here.

Some parents actually think a poor school is doing a good job, when it was really the parents who did the basic work without even thinking about it. My mother taught me how to read and my numbers up to 20 or so before I started school.

Ask some American kids how to spell these similar-looking words: recipe, receipt, receive, receptive, recipient. The longtime current method of teaching reading is one word at a time. Most of the time, when kids see a word like one in the list above, they're really just guessing.

Literacy in America at the time of the American Revolution was estimated to be about 90%. I believe Gatto gave an approximation of literacy in the 1880s as in the 93-97% range (when the public school system idea was put into operation). Some studies done in 1997 indicated that 21-23% of Americans were functionally illiterate.

One time I googled 'illiteracy and crime' and found that I wasn't alone in my suspicions that the two are closely related.

'Illiteracy and crime are closely related. The Department of Justice states, "The link between academic failure and delinquency, violence, and crime is welded to reading failure." Over 70% of inmates in America's prisons cannot read above a fourth grade level.' [italics are not mine] http://www.begintoread.com/research/literacystatistics.html

I also read somewhere that kids who haven't gotten a handle on reading by the time they are 13 will probably never be functionally literate, even with special tutoring. There are parents who are so busy with their own lives, they never notice that what their kid is 'reading' has really been memorized by hearing the other kids in school read the same things over and over. Illiterate people often have very good memories, adapting what they can do to partially make up for what they can't do.

It's past sad, it's past pathetic, it's CRIMINAL. But they've been getting away with it for about 120 years.

Most illiterate cities in America (over 50,000 pop.): http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=105x7291294

Sue, Public School Enemy #1