[GailA]

68 of Memphis schools are under threat of State take over, as if that would help them, considering the State can't even bungle it's way out of a fiscal crisis of their own making or fix that FLOP TennCare that is the second largest blackhole of Tax $$$$. Top Memphis business man and State School Board Member Avron Fogelman wants to DUMB down the standards EVEN MORE: Click Here

[ikanakattara]

This entire story is b.s. If you want to get really *meaningful* data on student performance, you have to separate schools out by demographics and geography. Inner city schools with largely minority student populations are doing terribly, and continue to do terribly no matter how much money you throw at them. Suburban school districts NOT under court-ordered integration plans do very well. If you look at middle or upper middle class suburban districts that ARE under court-ordered integration, and *separate out* the scores for the transfer students, you see that in general the non-transfer students score well.

This is the dirty little secret BOTH the left and right try to cover up. The leftists want to cover it up because worse *average* performance means more money for their programs. The right wants to cover it up because it undermines their agenda of privatization of the public schools (*including* the good suburban districts!)

You can do the same thing with test scores for *non-English speaking* immigrants. Of COURSE school districts like Los Angeles are going to have terrible performance on tests - the vast majority of their students can't speak or read English because of illegal immigration! In my state of Missouri, we have entire rural school districts that have been swamped with enormous numbers of Mexican immigrant children who can't speak a word of English, and yet they have to sit in the same classrooms and take the same tests as everyone else.

There are many problems with public schooling, but public schools are NOT responsible for: failure to enforce immigration laws; 14-year old crackhead mothers who abuse their babies to the point the kids are mentally disabled; parents who ignore their kids entirely, don't read to them, don't teach them proper English, etc. These "lower test scores" are showing the demographic cracks in American society, not an overall "failure" of public education.