4 Day School Week in Some Parts of the Country

[Lokrian]

Originally posted by Dalaena
I highlighted a sentence above because it bothered me greatly. Why would you calculate hours lost in a job someone never had or deliberately chose not to have? The assumption that all families are and SHOULD BE two income families bothers me a great deal. Some people have deliberately chosen to have one spouse to stay at home and have less luxury than if they were working two jobs. It's impossible to put a price tag on people (usually women) who choose to take this role. It is often a deliberate sacrifice when one person in a parenting unit decides to stay at home with the children. How can you put a pricetag on that when so many of the benefits are completely nebulous?

Because it makes the statistic more or less useless. The supposed cost of home schooling is $500 roughly, when what really has been sacrificed is substantially more than that. There's no useful information in the comparison if they are taking the cost of paying teachers into the school acount but simply assuming the home school parent's labor is worthless.

Put another way, you can well imagine what the cost per child would be in public education if the teacher/student ration were increased to 1/5, or 1/3, or even 1/1 for those families who only have one child at home being home schooled.

It's one thing to stress parental responsibility. It's another to blame parents in general without accurate understanding of which parents are guilty of what, when where how and why. A lot of people curse statistics just in general. I think they are invaluable, but you have to know how to use them. The statistic I am talking about there, as I said, appears entirely opaque to me. It has no real, discernible meaning whatsoever. It simply fails to give enough useful information.