Seriously Pitt County??

So maybe I was just spoiled with what I felt like was a very solid preparation for college...
Sure I will be partial to my alma mater of good old Shelby High (especially compared to nasty Crest... :0) Love you roomie) but I legitimately feel like I got a solid education through what was the Shelby City School system and later joined to become the Cleveland County School system. I always enjoyed school; and felt that it was preparing me well for later ventures in education (minus calculus and AP chem which I knew wouldn't help with anything).
But thinking back to elementary school, I really enjoyed learning and enjoyed my teachers. Now that I am babysitting a boy in 4th grade, I can't help but compare our educations at that age...and there seems to be little to compare, but A LOT to contrast. Granted its a different time and his days would focus on xbox and killing people on call of duty, when you take that out of the picture, his schooling is very much subpar. He's a bright kid when you sit and talk with him, but when he does his homework, he knows nothing. He can't read a passage and then tell me what its about. He can't think of creative sentences for his spelling words. It scares me on how little he is being challenged. I feel that if his teacher wants him to write a sentence with the word revive, she needs to take off points if he writes: My friend was revived. That doesn't show any thought or effort!! But he gets away with it. My reason for writing an entire blog post on this subject is because of what happened yesterday. He didn't know the meaning of a word, so I suggested that he looked it up in the dictionary. He got the dictionary and then came back to me 5 minutes later saying he couldn't find the word. In fact, he wasn't able to find any of his 6 spelling words in the dictionary. THE KID IS IN 4th GRADE AND HASN'T BEEN TAUGHT HOW TO USE A DICTIONARY!!! Heaven forbid! He said that he has yet to learn how to do that in school.. but later said, actually, they taught him 2 years ago, but he hasn't used one since.
Come on Pitt County. Please prepare your kids to make it through the school system without using their parents as crutches. College is going to crush them.