No, I'm not. My students improve their reading and writing scores significantly above the average for our region, and that's because I teach them everything from annotation to syntax, in Social Studies.

Here's some fun data for you. Parents tend to rate their local schools very favorably, but they rank public education in general very unfavorably. We get a lot of propaganda from the national press about how bad schools are, but when people actually go to their local schools they tend to like them. The national press loves to take isolated incidents and generalize them, but it's rarely generalizable.

brookings.edu/research/…

Now I'll be the first to admit public education is broken and flawed and needs a total overhaul. I've said it many times in these comments. But you can't get rid of public education. Going whole hog on market-based education is as good as creating a caste system. You can't make access contingent on your ability to pay when it comes to education.