The Inexplicable American Education

 

                  The Inexplicable American Education 

Education in the U.S. is a mystery. Is there anything more important in a democracy than the education of its potential citizens? No culture is so rich it can sacrifice its assets. Yet we ignore it, like we step over the homeless. This is from an article by Riley.

"Education in the U.S. is a crash course in conflict of interest that is so blatant and so damaging to the culture that it can be maintained only by great effort and distortion.

According to the most recent data from School Digger, a website that aggregates test score results, 23 of the top 30 schools in New York in 2019 were charters. The feat is all the more impressive because those schools sported student bodies that were more than 80% black and Hispanic, and some two-thirds of the kids qualified for free or discount lunches. The Empire State’s results were reflected nationally. In a U.S. News & World Report ranking released the same year, three of the top 10 public high schools in the country were charters, as were 23 of the top 100—even though charters made up only 10% of the nation’s 24,000 public high schools.

We are told constantly by defenders of the education status quo that the learning gap is rooted in poverty, segregation and “systemic” racism. We’re told that blaming traditional public schools for substandard student outcomes isn’t fair given the raw material that teachers have to work with. But if a student’s economic background is so decisive, or if black students need to be seated next to whites to understand Shakespeare and geometry, how can it be that so many of the most successful public schools are dominated by low-income minorities?

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Covid-19 has exposed just how much control teachers' unions have over K-12 education and, by extension, over so much else that affects our everyday lives. Randi Weingarten, head of the 1.7-million-member American Federation of Teachers, wakes up every morning in search of ways to keep children confined to traditional public schools, regardless of their quality. She and her thousands of state and local affiliate unions do this because it is good for their dues-paying members, and those interests come before the students and their families."