John hit the nail on the head, schools are too concerned with standardized testing and that seems to be the point of the curriculum. The other problem is so called "esteem building" that everyone does, all this has done is to allow mediocrity to become the norm. Johnny got an A today, but so did all of the rest of the class because if we gave anyone a lesser grade they might not feel good about themselves... School should go back to teaching the basics, I listen to one of my instructors complain about the students in his 300 level class that can't read or write at that level. How did they get there? It's simple nobody stopped them, they all let them get by.

 

That's not always the case. A lot of private schools rely on the public school system to fill in for remedial classes that they don't want to staff for because the cost would be too high, so the public school sends a bus over to pick up the kids at the private school that can't read or are behavioral problems and takes them to the appropriate public facility. So the private school takes your money and then instead of using it to teach your special needs kid, sends them to public school for tutoring.

Case in point, one of my nieces needed speech therapy when she was attending a private elementary school, because her mother thought the private school was better. Well everyday after she was in classes she had to leave her private school and take a public school bus to one of the public schools that had a teacher trained in speech therapy because the much better private school didn't have anyone on staff capable of teaching this. She was not alone on the bus either.