An interesting conversation. My feelings on education, and public education in particular, run very deeply indeed - I promise to try and avoid a "soapbox moment" :).

By way of background, I taught at a public middle school here in the US for 2 years then at a church-sponsored high school in the country of Tonga for 3 years. By the time my kids were old enough to "go to school" I had become familiar enough with the system (from within the system)to be convinced that it wasn't what I wanted for my kids. They have never attended a "school". We started "homeschooling" in Tonga - mostly since there was really no other option - and haven't found a compelling reason to stop. Some observations:

1) Age is a flimsy, anectodal, criteria for teacher quality - at best. I would cite the teacher's dedication to their students and ability to work within the system waaaaay before their age. Far harder to gather data on but more accurate, IMO.

2) Speaking of the system... It's the system, not the teacher. Posters projects are a great example. Assuming your class loads are anything like what I experienced, that teacher is dealing with 170-200 individuals every day, broken into a 1 vs. ~25 chunk for 1 hour at a time. How is that teacher supposed to give a meaningful learning experience to an individual in 2-3 minutes a day - assuming little Tommy is happy with his 2-3 minutes and doesn't create a disturbance that takes part of some one elses' time? Simply, the teacher CAN'T... So they try to even the odds by creating "team units" - now it's 1 vs. 5 for an hour.

Still, what the teacher needs is some standardized "product" that they can review to compare to the other "products" to either (a) put students on a continuum of competence or (b)have the students demonstrate their "understanding". Either way, the teacher needs something they can use to reduce their load in assigning grades since individual assessment is impossible. That's even assuming there aren't school/distric mandated "standards" that the teacher has to coax the students to perform to. It's ironic that we all recognize that every learner is different - especially if we want a high quality learning experience - then force a system that makes it IMPOSSIBLE to actually do that.

3) I find it interesting that when people talk about the danger of alternatives (home/un schooling) they still talk about "socialization" and "sports". It would be shocking to hear someone say "what about the academics their going to miss out on?".

Could you imagine anything sillier than if project teams at work or business partnerships or everyone assigned to your corporate department were identified simply by the neighborhood they lived in and the year in which they were born?

Most if not all districts that I've interacted with are able (if not always willing) to accomodate a partial enrollment schedule for band/sports. Particularly if your child is already any good ;) As you point out, Harold, many parents are already involving their kids in activities like these well outside the confines of the local school house.

I'm getting soap boxy now so I'll step down.