In Mitt Romney’s teacher bashing, high stakes test endorsing education speech, he said: More than 150 years ago, our nation pioneered public education. We’ve now fallen way behind.
Among developed countries, the United States comes in 14th of 34 in reading, 17th of 34 in science, and an abysmal 25th out of 34 in math.
Our public education system is supposed to ensure that every child gets a strong start in life. Yet, one in four students fails to attain a high school degree. And in our major cities, half of our kids won’t graduate.
Imagine that.
I would like you to imagine he was being truthful to you.
What he doesn’t mention is when you factor out poverty our rankings race to the top. What he doesn’t mention is when you factor out poverty our graduation rates raise significantly.
All the vouchers, charter schools and virtual schools run from India won’t do an iota of good until we address poverty but he doesn’t mention that fact.
The single most quantifiable statistic that determines how children do in school is poverty, those in it do a lot worse than those that aren’t and a fifth of our kids live in poverty, another fifth just above it but once again that wasn’t in his speech either.
He has now given people that believe in public education a clear choice.
The method you use to arrive at your conclusion is flawed. You cannot remove poverty from one group and not the other when making your comparison. Or are you assuming the other countries have no poverty?
ReplyDeleteUm, have you not looked at the poverty levels of Finland, Korea, and others? They are minimal. Wake up.
DeleteI hear what you are saying and to be honest I don't know the poverty rates of every country but I do know of industralized cuntries we are way up there and Finland who ed reformers often bring up has a poverty rate of less than 5%...
ReplyDeleteAnd the biggest driver of poverty is single motherhood.
ReplyDelete