[babygene]

Sorry, but that’s not the reason... the fact is that some people are just smarter than others.

[Nepeta]

In the late 1980s, I had a neighbor who taught high school science classes. One year she showed me textbooks, which were glorious, full color productions, nothing like the stodgy texts of my youth. (We were still using Latin textbooks from the 1930, which had been through multiple re-bindings over the last 3 decades.)

She was teaching what purported to be college prep level classes. Before a test, she would go over the material that was supposed to be fair game for testing; she said the outcome was predictable: there would be on B in the class, a handful of Cs, and the rest would get Ds and Fs. She practically handed out the answers, but unmotivated people are not going to deliver, no matter how slick the books and how the teacher spoon feeds the material.

Facilities do not make the student. My schools were all basic buildings with nothing particularly glitzy, nothing like the palaces I saw when I took short night courses in other locations.

If the student is unmotivated and the parents do not push, no one should be shocked at bare literacy at "graduation." At some point, well before junior high, one should understand that one is responsible for personal academic outcomes...

[Eva]

All of a sudden Obama is touting equality of opportunity after abandoning the concept in favor of outcome based education in 2008.

How can he he do an about face and expect people not to notice?

Education is the great equalizer, but the student must be motivated to take advantage of the opportunities that are presented. That is the reason that the progressives switched to outcome based education, they felt that white children had an unfair advantage in motivation that was rooted in historic White privilege.

The fact is that the Progressives destroyed the motivation of students in the poor urban communities when they destroyed their self respect.

[ComputerGuy]

Just as we have an IQ gap, we have an income gap. It’s that simple.

[Vendome]

Wrong

[Secret Agent Man]

public education today is poorer than in the past.

compounding it is so many in public schools don’t care about their own education.

[Jim Noble]

Failing Education: The True Cause Of Income Inequality

Nonsense.

The cause of income inequality is human inequality. Individuals, and group medians, vary widely in various gifts and talents.

The resulting effects are quite apparent.

[driftless2]

Sorry to burst your bubble, but the idea that poor students are the results of unionized schools is a myth. Speaking as a conservative, the student and his or her family is far more important in determining the academic success of the student than the school or the teachers at the school. Read Robert Weissberg's "Bad Students, Not Bad Schools" to get the lowdown.

Conservative pols and pundits have bought into the school choice scam as a panacea for lousy student performance. Charter schools and private/parochial schools were supposed to save everybody. It only works for students with the desire and intelligence to do well. Which leaves out a great percentage of the nation's students. Many students (especially inner city students) are unmotivated, violent, and have low IQs. Plus their parents don't care much or at all how they do in school. School is a babysitting service for those parents.

I'm for school reform as much as any conservative if it means halting the spread of leftist indoctrination and the return to time-honored, American values. But the idea that simply putting every failing student in a charter school or similar educational environment will turn them in the next Einstein or merely a little better student than they were before is hogwash.