Myths of Education

Hello dear friends,

     It is I, the Raving Lunatic, back to ask a question.  "Just how good is the U.S Education system?
I have just netflixed the movie "Waiting for Superman,"  and found it a bit underwhelming.  It was just as underwhelming as the educational component in Freakanomics.  There are stories, facts and figures out there pro-this or anti-that.  But what info makes the MOST difference when it comes to education?

Is it the quality of the teachers?  Is it the neighborhood the school is located in?  Is it the parents of students?  Is it the influx of immigrants in our school systems?  Can we just fire bad teachers? 


Public education is a right pf passage in American society. Maybe your family had a little money, or your parents worked their asses off to send you to private school.  It is known that the public schools must accept everyone who appears at their doors, no matter their race, language, economic status, or disability. Like the huddled masses who arrived from Europe in years gone by, immigrants from across the world today turn to the public schools to learn what they need to know to become part of this society. The schools should be far better than they are now, but making them all private charters, or offering school vouchers is no solution.


It bears mentioning that nations with high-performing school systems—whether Korea, Singapore, Finland, or Japan—have succeeded not by privatizing their schools or closing those with low scores, but by strengthening the education profession. They also have less poverty than we do. Fewer than 5 percent of children in Finland live in poverty, as compared to 20 percent in the United States. Those who insist that poverty doesn’t matter, that only teachers matter, prefer to ignore such contrasts.


Parents seem to demand that public schools start firing “bad” teachers so they can get the great results that one of every five charter schools gets. But he never explains how difficult it is to identify “bad” teachers. If one looks only at test scores, teachers in affluent suburbs get higher ones. If one uses student gains or losses as a general measure, then those who teach the neediest children—English-language learners, troubled students, autistic students—will see the smallest gains, and teachers will have an incentive to avoid districts and classes with large numbers of the neediest students.