US Students Getting Expert Help... From India

Many USA teachers even in horrible government schools make pretty good money for 8 months work. One reason I believe the schools are horrible is that the teachers are poorly educated themselves, mostly having degrees in a non-intellectual topic called "education." Here we learn that for a few bucks an hour USA kids can get internet video conferencing assistance from Indian tutors... tutors who I presume have respectable academic credentials. In this way kids with meager financial resources can get for a less than 5$/hr what other kids get for 50$/hr or more.

This opens all sorts of possibilities for home schooling. At what point does a family even with parents who work all day decide to tell their teenagers to skip school and perform work assigned to them, monitored, and assisted by rigorously educated Indians 10,000 miles away? If at least one parent has a work computer with internet access, now the parent can monitor the student's academic day. Now we have a mechanism for parents to get their kids to study seriously for 6 hours each day, with no need for home work, and full monitoring by parents, parents who (unlike government school parents) know every day what their kid got assigned and how they performed; no more waiting for those nearly useless 6-week report cards, or those completely useless daily "assignment books" in which kids every day inaccurately record what their teachers have assigned as homework. No more worrying about your kid getting hold of that attrocious smattering of food products distributed in the cafeterias, and in their chums' lunch pails. No more worrying about all the wasted school time each day devoted to non-academic assemblies, field trips, and rowdy behavior by kids that the school can't bannish.

And no more begging teachers and administrators to entertain suggestions that they didn't solicit and will not respect (How about daily we postings and emails of attendance, grades, and homework? How about wholesome cafeteria food? Sir, those are impossible suggestions. If you had an Education degree, you'd understand.) Can my kid learn Spanish one-on-one for an hour each day? What about the trumpet? Now all we parents have to do is rush home each day early enough to drive our kids over to the public school to participate in the only things that they do excellently: sports and band programs.

As we learned last week, Detroit public schools spend every year for each student nearly $12,000, for what everybody considers to be a very poor average education experiance. The subburbs are better usually only because mediocre beats the "inner city" school performances. All too often school social experiance includes exposure to dangerous peer influences, and even interactions. Can a kid working at home with Indians over a video conferencing computer obtain a more productive academic day than going to many government USA schools? It would not surprise me.

The free market to the rescue.