For kicks I pointed my scientist wife to the link (yes, we met in a lab and had, er, good chemistry–though I've been out of the lab for over 10 years) to get her take. I guess that gives us an unfair advantage over other parents, lol.

Most public school teachers I know have ridiculous benefits compared to the private sector. Tiny co-pays, everything is covered from viagra, to braces etc. One has cosmetic surgery coverage for Christs sake.

I can't even send my 4 kids to the public school here that I contribute over $10k portion of my property taxes because the kids are being taught in trailers due to a lack of space, and the standardized test scores suck. Yet we have a Superintendent, again working 6 months/year, who makes $200k+ to oversee 4 poorly performing schools.

You tell them wayne!

Now can somebody tell me why this insanity doesn't contribute to our soon to be 2 trillion dollar ANNUAL deficit that is going to make this downturn look wimpy compared to the day other countries stop buying our soon to be worthless debt created by this broken public education system?

I say give the parents the cash back and create a free market school system. Now watch how schools, administrators and teachers begin to compete for the dollars which would be based on results instead of tenure.

And I had the very distinct impression at the science fair that the teachers were able to guess the amount of parental involvement.

My understanding is that should you feel your child qualifies under No Child Left Behind, that you are able to call a meeting where the school must provide you with either their reason your child doesn't qualify or create a plan under federal guidelines.

In most of those meetings you are allowed to bring a "parent advocate" — and the unspoken issue is the schools never know whether that advocate is an attorney, specialist or your neighbor……so it puts them on their highest level of alert.

And always strive to be the nicest parent in the school should you find the need to complain. The hotheads are always discounted all the way up the school chain of command.

I also have great fondness for parent teacher conferences which occur in April (two months before school's due to release) where the teacher suddenly announces the poor performance of your student, that she's "concerned" whether the child can progress to the next grade level and all manner of issues that you'd asked about at the prior 3 conferences and were not raised.

Tip: When faced with an "April surprise" be sure to use the following two abbreviations as you listen compassionately. It's your right under federal law to request this at any time. Schools absolutely hate it:

1. NCLB
2. PPT

I thought the "teacher" was going to fall over backwards in her chair.

PS – The third word schools hate to hear in combination with the two above "parent advocate"

Even understanding the intended spirit, I have to say that I think that both examples of made up "projects" would be wrong, and portray an inaccurate image of teachers in public schools.

First, teacher pay – teachers are not paid for the summer, unless they work teaching summer school. Some districts have the option of spreading their pay for the entire year to not disrupt their income flow, but it is not the same as being paid for doing nothing. The short days, well MY experience (and it can be different for others) is that teachers are usually still in the school at meetings, preparing for parent conferences, or continuing education at those times, which is why they are scheduled in the first place. If you add in the dollars that most teachers spend on classroom supplies and other items out of their pockets because school budgets are stretched so thin, salary numbers go down again.

As to the photocopies, with all the commentary about falling standardized test scores, schools are being forced to become more "cookie cutter" if they want to receive federal funds. They have to be able to prove that they are working from a standard curriculum that will in theory bring up a standardized test score. In order to do that, they use the lesson plan provided. Just because they assign homework from a book, doesn't mean that their skills lack or that they are less invested – they are following guidelines set down by bureaucrats who are looking for more funding dollars and trying to grab as many of them as they can.

As for parental participation in school projects – good parents participate because they are involved with their kids education and their lives. While you look around and see which project was most likely done by a parent, check out which ones weren't and see if the parents are even in attendance at the event. Like I said, good parents participate, and they do it by making a conscious choice to be involved. Good on you for being involved enough to even notice how your kid's homework looks, let alone know the name of the textbook printer it comes from.

In the same spirit as the original post, maybe a better example would be to check out the dollars invested in school sports (which also have tremendous value to students, but are not a part of the classroom budget) and compare those budgets the the average classroom teaching math, and calculate how much more a teacher could do with the difference in the classroom to increase test scores if we invested as much per student there, as we do on sports.

And the teachers, are they in LALA Land, to think the kids are doing this crap? Applied science is cool, and should be encouraged, but science fairs are crap, and any teacher who thinks otherwise needs to quit drinking the Koolaid.

Mine are 9 years old — so their ability to create and manage a project may be a bit less than older kids.

I'm trying to think whether for the 4 years that my kids have been in school whether there have been any home work assignments that look like they're anything except a photocopied "McGraw Hill". Right now I can't think of any (and I pasted in an exact image of an assignment from this year).

My stepfather was an elementary teacher until his retirement a few years ago. I can remember every night that he would create his own lesson plans and be grading well into the evening – so I guess some of that exists — just none that I've observed yet in the Glastonbury Schools.

If you figured my mother's salary and added in all the extra work she does, trust me she does plenty to earn her pay, and doesn't really take a break even in the summers. Maybe you should move your kids to NJ where the teachers work harder.

I think there is a lot of pressure now to do really complicated projects, which really puts it in parents' laps. I did projects like, "Does different music affect the way plants grow?" (They hated Motley Crue and loved Henry Mancini) that were easy for me to control and handle myself.