9. Many public schools subject children to drugs, bullies, violence, and values many parents disapprove of.

10. Public schools pressure many parents who have bright, normal children to give their kids potentially dangerous mind-altering drugs to make bored kids "behave" in class. Over four million allegedly "unruly" kids line up for Ritalin every day in public schools across America. Methylphenidate (sold as Ritalin) and cocaine are both listed in "Schedule II" of U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency's Controlled Substances Act (CSA).

11. Public schools are compulsory. They therefore violate parents’ natural and constitutional right to control education of their children. Public school authorities, whose salaries we pay with our taxes, force parents to hand over their children to government employees called teachers and to schools that give an inferior education.

12. Public schools can destroy children's love of learning and self-confidence as learners. This can cripple children's ambitions and desire to go to college. This in turn, can force these children to end up with low-paying jobs for rest of their lives if and when they graduate high school.

13. Public schools force millions of Christian parents to hand over their children to public schools which are decidedly anti-Christian. For example, many social studies textbooks used in public schools have censored out references to such words as 'family,' 'marriage,' 'religion,' 'fidelity,' etc. Many textbooks today refer to a family simply as people choosing to live together.

14. Public schools force children to witness sometimes shocking or obnoxious sexual material in sex-education classes, without parents’ knowledge or consent.

15. The public-school near monopoly and compulsory-attendance laws cripple parents right and ability to choose a quality, low-cost school in an education free-market that has been squashed by public-school monopoly.

Parents should consider taking their kids out of public school permanently. Parents can take advantage of quality, low-cost education alternatives available to them right now, such as new Internet private schools that have low tuition costs.

Joel Turtel is an education policy analyst, and author of “Public Schools, Public Menace: How Public Schools Lie To Parents and Betray Our Children."

Article Copyrighted © 2005 by Joel Turtel.

In Wisconsin, state legislators backed off plans to require high school graduation tests because of strong opposition by parents from affluent suburbs. One parent group calling itself “Advocates for Education” argued that high-stakes testing would not be fair to children and would hurt educational quality in schools.

Critics of graduation tests were worried that tests would put too much pressure on children. Suburban parents lobbied parent-teacher organizations, and state legislators eventually scrapped graduation test before a single high-school student had taken it.

Similarly, New York and Massachusetts officials yielded to pressure by parents to set low passing grades for their new graduation tests. In Virginia and Arizona, state boards of education have backed away from graduation tests that were too tough for even so-called better schools. Only 7 percent of schools in Virginia met new achievement standards, and 9 out of 10 sophomores in Arizona schools failed a new math test.

In New York City, school authorities estimated that over 30 percent of city’s 11th-graders would not be eligible to graduate if English language standard that will take effect next year was being applied today. Diane Ravitch of Brookings Institute in Washington is a longtime analyst of New York’s public-school system She estimated that in some neighborhoods, less than 5 percent of high-school seniors would qualify to graduate under new standards.

Parents, particularly those with younger children, should take heed. You don’t want to end up with high-school kids who may not graduate because they can’t pass new tests. In Chapters 8, 9, and Resource section of "Public Schools, Public Menace," I explore how you can circumvent these serious problems by finding real education alternatives outside public schools.

Article Copyrighted © 2005 by Joel Turtel.