The Education Wars: Some Commentary

Try to tell Obama and Duncan how difficult it is to really reform education when problems of inequality and poverty still exist:

We have currently the greatest level of social inequality since the early 20th century. We have more than 20 percent of children living below the official poverty level, a minimum wage that cannot support individuals and almost 40 million people receiving food stamps with a significant number representing this as their only income. We have the largest prison population in the world, with almost 1 percent of adults in jail, and we have almost 50 million Americans without health insurance. More than 4 million homes have been lost already to foreclosure and 15 million are under water. All of these factors contribute to family dysfunction and the highest level of poverty of any nation in the developed world. Absent change, the situation will worsen.

That inequality and poverty affect educational achievement is scarcely a novel finding, having been explicitly recognized more than 40 years ago in the Coleman report and in many subsequent findings in the United States and elsewhere. Repairing school buildings, removing incompetent teachers and having real nationwide standards are important goals, but are not in themselves sufficient. And privatization and charter schools are simply mechanisms for increasing social inequality.

It's much easier to bash teachers and unions than it is to fix the underlying problems in our society.