We are tutoring my niece but I have a one year old daughter who I want to home school when she is older. I added a sentence to clarify. The thing is our local schools use to have better standards. In terms of state tests and educational success things use to be better. Focus has changed. Curriculum has changed. Less funding so there isn't enough money for supplies to teach.

I don't think it's the parents job to teach kids things you are sending them to school to learn. I mean a whole class of kids never learned how to multiply numbers. They missed a huge chunk of math material and the school didn't supply a proper replacement to teach them what they needed and then started them then next year with material more advanced than they were. Basically with my niece we are starting at scratch trying to teach her 3rd grade math when she is in 4th grade because she never was taught 3rd grade math. Then we have to catch her up on 4th grade math. We are having to teach ourselves common core math which wasn't taught years ago just to help her. How can parents pick up the slack in extremely bad cases?

I also think the extraneous problems do need to be discussed if they are part of the larger problem. Not having enough funding to give kids textbooks and relying on cheap worksheets is a problem. A school being aware a teacher has a substance abuse problem but continuing to let her work even though she shows signs of not doing a good job and then not cleaning up the mess of a bad education is a problem. Little problems add up. Though these little problems are for my community and not applicable to larger statewide or nationwide problems. Little things shouldn't be ignored though.