'Pffft, English. Who needs that. I'm never going to England.'

Everybody else's blogs filled with posts on education, so, considering I'm a full-time, debt-ridden postgraduate who aims to teach someday, I should throw my two-cents into the fray as well.

{crickets . . .}

I'll be quite honest -- I've no clue what the state of America's schools are. I escaped in the early '90s relatively unscathed, a good GPA, two or three friends I never saw after graduation, etc. Now that I think of it, I can't really remember much of it. The point is any opinion I might've had about the 'state of America's educational system' was never really framed around my experience, because I deemed it far too banal to matter to anybody but me. Instead, and this perhaps shows how stupid I can be, I believed what I was told. Namely, that America's schools are horrible -- that American students can't find Turkey on the map, and that they wouldn't know what to do with a quadratic equation were it to solve itself for them. (Or, more recently, that they can't write -- cf,. Ampersand for more on that.) I think I've asked this question before about something else, but . . . what if that myth wasn't exactly true?.

In an article I completely missed last week, Gerald W. Bracey not only asks this question, he knocks it off its pristine pedestal, leers at it menacingly, and then gets medieval. All in the name, it seems, to finally get in some parting shots on the 'No Child Left Behind' program, which incidentally I never hear anything about anymore:

Blaming public schools for social ills has a long and dishonorable history, of which the 1983 report is only one particularly egregious example. Yet in the international reading study released this month (and ignored by most media), American students finished ninth among 35 nations. White American students outscored top-ranked Sweden 565 to 561. Americans attending schools with less than 10 percent of the students in poverty (13 percent of all students) scored a whopping 589, and only those attending schools with more than 75 percent of the students in poverty (20 percent of all students) scored below the international average.

These statistics tell us how wealth and poverty affect achievement, and where we need to allocate resources. We don't need to spend billions to test every child every year in reading, math and science, as the No Child Left Behind legislation requires, to find out.

Bracey's point, obviously, isn't that America's educational system is problem-free. Rather, it's just that the myth of American teenagers being the dumbest on the planet misses the importance of the distinctly American socio-economic realities that affect the international education assessments that the American press use to bombastically scold and presidents use to win votes. A tidy dialectic, really. In effect, it's a handy way to not deal with the education hurdles faced by millions of impoverished minorities in America's urban schools. Lest you think you're going to get a solution here at Silentio, dream on. (As if any of you return to this blog for answers! HA!) I've not a clue what the solution is, or if there really is one that we might discover; though I'm pretty certain, maybe, kinda, that Scott Martens' suggestion is not the way to go. (But man oh man, I love the unmitigated cheek to propose it!! It's a long post, but, as is the case with most of his long stuff, worth it.)

Anyway, if you're at all interested in this type of thing, Gerald Bracey -- head of, by the way, the curiously named Education Disinformation Detection and Reporting Agency [EDDRA] -- has written some more pretty interesting stuff that might be worth your while. Most notably, see here and here.