Inconvenient Truth: America's Public Schools Are Among Highest Achieving In The World

Re-posted by Nacktman
Tuesday, January 06, 2015, 3:13 pm
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For the past two decades, at least, so-called "education reformers" in the Republican privatization movement, and recently the Obama Administration Education Department, have criticized the American public school system as an abject failure. Obviously, there is huge money driving the "education reform" movement's drive to shift public school funding to the technology industry, religious private schools, and particularly the grossly under-performing corporate-run charter schools. There is also a concerted effort on both sides of the political spectrum to destroy teacher unions and disabuse the overwhelming majority of women teachers of the idea they deserve a semi-living wage and secure retirement.
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Any educator is well aware that there are issues out of their control in attempting to teach every student that enters their classroom, and now another damning study reveals that it is not poorly-qualified teachers, union representation, or tenure hampering achievement; it is poverty borne of America's existential problem of income inequality. In fact, according to yet another study, America's wealthiest traditional public schools that are unionized with tenured teachers are among the world's highest achieving schools. If, as privatization "reformers" in the republican cabal, corporate, and Obama Education Department claim that America's public schools are dire failures, then America's wealthy public schools with unionized teachers, and tenure, would be failing and not at the "top of the international charts."
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What that means is that it is not unionization, tenure, or inadequate teachers, but "high poverty" that is the crux of low academic and test score achievement on several levels. In fact, in the U.S. Department of Education study that the Administration's Education Secretary, or President Obama, failed to read because it is inconvenient, it reveals that "about one in five public schools was considered high poverty" as of 2011; up from one in eight just ten years ago." In a previous Education Department study, it found that "most high-poverty public schools receive much less than their fair share of state and local funding leaving students in poor schools with far fewer resources than schools attended by their wealthier peers." It is noteworthy, that the teachers at both wealthy and poor schools have exactly the same education level, teacher training, union representation, achievement standards, testing, and curriculum, and yet it is glaringly obvious the only difference is funding and crushing poverty regarded as the primary "out-of-school" factors affecting student achievement.
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