Every Single Public School In America Sucks...

...Or so we've been told. Unless you've been living in the outer reaches of our cozy little solar system, you've no doubt heard (more than once) that the public schools in the United States of America are completely awful. Beyond redemption. Abysmally bad. Downright crappy. According to the education glitterati, there are multiple reasons for this failure. Government intervention is a main one - here's that Libertarian argument laid out rather thoroughly. Another major reason, so the narrative goes, is the poor quality of the teacher's who stand in front of the kids every day.  This theory has sparked the "let's get rid of the bad teachers" approach - another in a long list of silver bullets, that, if implemented as Bill Gates suggests in this piece, would shoot America back to the top of the international rankings in education.

The previous silver bullet designed to fix public education was the test-and-torture monster known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB). This ugly beast sought to squeeze achievement out of public school students by testing them at every turn in a narrow number of subjects, primarily math and reading/english. While it's taken some time, we're finally starting to see some significant push back from the states on the incessant testing that lay at the heart of NCLB. After vetoing a new version of the school test data monster, California governor Jerry Brown wrote an eloquent letter addressing his concern about the course and nature of educational evaluation in the state. And, you know something's wrong with your accountability system when officials in 345 school districts in Texas - representing 4.2 million students - sign a petition protesting high stakes testing.

Much (if not all) of this conjecture about the crummy status of American public education rests on the belief that, when American students are compared to their peers in other countries, their performance is underwhelming. Even Aaron Sorkin got in on the American underperformance act with the high-quality liberal pablum known as The Newsroom. Yes, yes - when liberals and conservatives conclude that we've fallen of our perch, they must surely be on to something, right? According to Michael Lind, in an interesting piece in Salon, the conclusion that public schools are significantly underperforming is based on faulty comparisons.  When we break down the data, we find that the majority of students in the United States are performing in the upper tier along with the top performers in other advanced nations. It should come as a surprise to absolutely no one that the groups of kids in the U.S. who underperform on international assessments are low-income children of color and rural kids. Their performance - and their futures - are dogged by an insistent poverty that no level of testing, teacher removal, and voucher provision will alleviate.