KNOX COUNTY SCHOOLS: My local school system, which is aggressively pursuing truants and threatening parents with jail time, also seems to cancel school itself for all sorts of reasons, according to no discernible pattern. (Once, I kid you not, I took my daughter to school only to find it closed — because of fog.) We sure didn’t have this many days off when I was a kid. That has at least allowed me to get a late start this morning, so I guess I shouldn’t complain.

Perhaps they’re having a seminar today, in which they explain to one of her teachers that evolutionary theory hasn’t actually been scientifically discredited in favor of creation science, despite what he told my daughter. Sigh.

There are good teachers there, and the Insta-Daughter’s intellectual advancement certainly isn’t being held back (though, like me, she learns much more on her own than from sitting in class). But there are days when I think that the strident-sounding criticism of “government schools” by Neal Boortz, et al., just might have something to it.

UPDATE: A reader emails:

If I were going to post something about my daughter’s school system, (Williamson County) I would have posted exactly the same thing you did about Knox County Schools.

You wouldn’t believe the number of memos that are sent home with long lists of symptoms for which the students should remain at home, but should your child actually stay home with one or more of those more than, perhaps, once, you are instantly guilty of not taking your child’s education seriously.

Apparently, our children really belong to the County Board of Education and we are just renting them for the evenings and weekends.

I couldn’t agree with you more that the random number of scheduled days off do not indicate the same level of “seriousness” on the part of the school system.

My daughter, like yours, also learns far more on her own than she ever has learned in the seven hours and thirty two minutes a day she is required to be in the school building.

Should anyone from the school ever hear me say that….. rest assured there will be letters and a knock on the door from yet another government agency-the almighty DCS!

I’m so glad to see your post about this.

Well, you know, DCS isn’t that bad. But it’s that attitude, coupled with the inconsistent behavior, that bothers me, too.

I was on Tennessee’s Juvenile Justice Reform Commission a few years ago, and was appalled to hear state agencies offer the very same excuses — lack of time and money, for example — that they wouldn’t accept from parents, when they failed to provide children with services required by law. (Indeed, Knox County is being sued right now for not providing adequate alternative education and is offering those excuses). I was pretty astringent about it, too.

I don’t buy into the argument that teachers are lazy, dumb, etc., which you often hear on talk radio. Most of them — like most of the people on the frontlines in any agency — are pretty dedicated and pretty good. Some are much better. But the systems as a whole tend to be bureaucratic. And it seems to be that way everywhere: I spent the first part of elementary school in Cambridge, Massachussetts, and the second part here (with a year in Germany as the divider) and you got pretty much the same stuff regardless.

I wonder, though, if the increasing availability of private education and homeschooling doesn’t make things worse, by draining off some of the parents whose complaints would otherwise force the system to behave better. At some point, I suppose, the effects of competition will shift things the other way, but that dynamic doesn’t seem to be taking hold, yet.