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Excellent article- thank you for posting it.

There's an interesting book by Diane Ravitch on this, Reign of Error. I recommend it.

Great points!

@Mrs. Lion: this is a great article!

"The takeaway is simple. Our middle-class and wealthy public school children are thriving. Poor children are struggling, not because their schools are failing but because they come to school with all the well-documented handicaps that poverty imposes – poor prenatal care, developmental delays, hunger, illness, homelessness, emotional and mental illnesses, and so on."
"The report concludes that “Nobody understands the challenges and shortcomings of American schools better than the people who have dedicated their lives to them.” Yet educators are rarely asked for their expertise. That snub is bipartisan – with Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo taking a combative stand against public school teachers in his recent inaugural address, and Republican Governors of Nevada and Texas establishing committees on education comprised solely of non-educators."

I feel like the discussion of public schools today always come back to these two points for me. Politicians get more leverage out of blaming public schools and educators then they do from addressing the REAL issues. Trying to fix the inequalities of our economic classes is far harder than saying "teachers suck, am I right?!"

What an interesting article.

I've been doing lots of research into our public schools since my daughter will be starting kindergarten in about 2 years (!!). Everything I've read so far indicates that the public schools in the wealthiest communities in our area are doing exceptionally well. The median home prices in those areas are in the $500K - $1M range. The schools in the not-so-nice parts of town? They're not doing too hot

It's stressing me out. I want to send my daughter to the awesome public schools, but there's no way we can afford a home in that area...

@Mrs. Jacks: Ha .... as a resident of TN, that all sounds sadly familiar.

@pinkcupcake: the state I grew up in was sadly very like that. The wealthy lived in one concentrated area and had the best public schools in the country. I grew up in a much poorer part of the state and my public school was awful. I have so many horror stories from it. They are fun to whip out at cocktail parties. (like the advanced English teacher who said it was more important to know the plots of stories than to read them so she just showed us movies. Or that we had no required reading the entire time in HS, minus two books. Or that we didn't offer physics or calculus. I had to go to another school, 45 min away to take those. And we had no AP classes either.)

Then I went to college where most of the kids were from the wealthy part of the state. Only about 1/5 of the kids I went to school with went to a four year college. The differences on the quality of our education were vast. IMO, funding schools from property taxed is grossly unfair. It ensures that the wealthy have very good schools and the poor do not. And then the cycle continues.