Thomas Edison’s public school expelled him at age seven because his teacher thought he was feeble-minded. Edison, one of our greatest inventors, had only three months of formal schooling. After leaving school, his mother taught him basics at home over next three years. Under his mother’s care and instruction, young Edison thrived.

If Thomas Edison was alive today as that child of seven, school authorities would probably stick him in special- education classes. Poor Thomas would waste his precious mind and be bored to death until they released him from school at age sixteen.

So it turns out that many of famous Americans our children now read about in their dumbed-down public-school textbooks were either homeschooled, never set foot in a government-controlled public school, or thankfully only went to a public school for a very short period of time.

Joel Turtel is an education policy analyst. He is also the author of "The Welfare State: No Mercy For The Middle Class." Contact Information: Website: http://www.mykidsdeservebetter.com, Email: lbooksusa@aol.com, Phone: 718-447-7348. Article Copyrighted © 2005 by Joel Turtel. Article can be reprinted on ezines or newsletters only if Contact information to Joel Turtel and his website is included

In 1990, three academics, Harold Stevenson, Chuansheng Chen, and David Uttal did a study of attitudes and academic achievement of black, white, and hispanic children in Chicago. They found a disturbing gap between what parents thought their children were learning and children’s actual performance. Teachers in high-poverty schools had given A’s to students for work that would have earned them C’s or D’s in affluent suburban schools. In study, black mothers of Chicago elementary school students rated their child’s skills and abilities quite high and thought their kids were doing well in reading and math. The children thought same thing.

Unfortunately, researchers found that parents’ and children’s self-evaluations of their math and reading skills were way above their actual achievement levels. There was a big gap between their optimistic self-evaluations and their dismal academic performance on independent tests. Public schools were giving these children a false idea of their academic skill levels. In other words, these children were heading towards failure and no one bothered to tell them.

Parents, it would not be wise to trust any claims by teachers or school authorities about your children’s alleged academic abilities, even in so-called “good” schools in suburban neighborhoods. To find out how your child is really doing, have an outside independent company test your child’s reading and math skills.

If you find that your child’s academic skills are far below what your local public-school led you to believe, you might want to take your child out of public school and look for better education alternatives. There is a complete Resource section in “Public Schools, Public Menace” that explores many of these quality, low-cost education alternatives.