How much more funding would there be, if we weren’t committing ourselves to trying to educate the children of Mexico?
Go to other countries and you will immediately see why our education system is so bad.
They don’t have the discipline problems that we have.
Make education a privilege , not a right, and get rid of those who screw it up and our system will be fine.
To understand the present situation, it helps to suppose that the public schools are not failures but solid successes at achieving their goals.
It also aids the understanding to assume, just for the moment, that the faceless grey bureaucrats lurking in the institutional establishments are not parasites, but predators.
IMHO, the best hope is for America’s children to offer massive but passive resistance to this socialist nightmare - play hooky by the millions!
If that doesn’t work, then I guess they’ll just have to escape, one by one, like my generation.
I’ve seen evidence that much of this is arguably related more to demography than actual differences in education.
Children of Swedish ancestry in America outperform average Swedes.
Children of Japanese ancestry in America outperform average Japanese.
Children of African ancestry in America outperform average Africans.
Etc. By just about every country. The difference is that America averages in a lot (and increasing numbers) of people who are from low-performing ethnic groups.
Coaching HS baseball had a way of undoing some of the damage.
Though look for an uptick of leftist attacks on competitive sports in general.
“Competition? Aaaaaaaahhhhhhhh!”
Google “Frankfurt School” for causation.
In 2008, we took important steps toward remaking the New Orleans school system by working with the Legislature to approve a landmark scholarship program for low-income students in the city who were trapped in failing schools (a program that we later expanded statewide)....Since 2007, the percentage of students in New Orleans who are reading and doing math at grade level has more than doubled. And, New Orleans is the number one ranked school district on the Brookings Choice and Competition Index.
But don't make the case with bad data.
Most countries don't test all of their over-12s the way we do. So, they screen the test-taking population (wisely) to select those with a good chance for success. Also, since ethnic groups, all over the world, vary widely in intellectual ability, until you match US students of similar ethnic backgrounds with overseas competitors, you really can't make much sense out of it.