The gray economy extends to the education system, where many Greek students pay on the side to fill in holes left by lackluster teaching. Katerina Karamatsiou, a young Athenian, recalls her high-school physics teacher telling the class: “What’s the point in teaching you? You all go for private tuition after school anyway.” He offered such after-hours, tax-free tuition himself, she says.
If you think this sort of thing isn’t happening here, you’re fooling yourself. It’s just less visible because it’s currently restricted to the high-income part of the American population, who among other things know how to keep their mouths shut.
This has been going on throughout the U.S. for a long time, and is no secret. Nor is it confined to the wealthy. I am lower middle class, and both my children ended up attending Sylvan Learning Center to improve reading skills. Unlike my local public school system, Sylvan tests students to find any gaps in thier understanding, and to locate weak areas and then teaches them those specific skills as well as general phonics. Cost: $50 per hour. My family spent over $10,000 in tutoring for my children. It’s certainly not cheap, but the result, along with parental involvement in studying, is two students on the honor roll. It’s not that the public school teachers aren’t good, they are. I live in the Walnut Creek, KKKalifornia area, which is considered to be upper middle class, with fairly good schools! It’s that in each class room there is at least one and often three or more problem children who take up a great deal of the teachers time and attention.
If public schools are going to work, they need to bring back corporal punishment.
I don’t buy this ADD and other medical diagnostic horse pucky. Having said that, my son was one of those problem children for the first couple years at school. My wife was in the class room for several hours each day with him until he learned to behave properly and not disrupt class or prevent other students from learning. ADD and other handicaps have been around for a long time, students used to live with it and behave, now it’s an excuse that allowes them to get away with horrible, rude, disruptive actions with no fear of penalty. Bring back classroom corporal punishment, civility, and learning.
I’m with you on that one ARMAGGEDON REX, I don’t buy the ADD and other medical diagnostic horse pucky either. I believe it’s a handy label to put on a kid that allows parents to shift their parenting responsibilities onto others and gives them an “out” for being labeled as lax parents. A little direction, discipline, and consistancy go a long, long way …….. in addition to not letting the kids run the zoo of course.
Rex: Walnut Creek has fairly good schools, yes, but your time in Kali has made you lose perspective, a la the fabled lobster in the slowly-boiling pot.
In 1987 when my family moved down from Oregon, the only East Bay public high schools with test scores even remotely close to my high school in Corvallis, Oregon were in Lafayette, Orinda, and Moraga. Walnut Creek (Las Lomas High: Ugh!) wasn’t even close. I was off to UC Berkeley, but my parents had to buy an empty plot of land in Lafayette and use that as our residence address so my younger brother could commute to Acalanes High in Lafayette. (We eventually built a house on the land.) Lafayette, Orinda, and Moraga, for those not in the SF Bay Area, are some of the wealthiest towns we’ve got. Aside from demographics, the thing that helps those schools is tremendous parent involvement — and monetary donations.
In Corvallis, we had none of that. But test scores were through the roof.