Education

First, Education Reform has very little to do with improving education.  It does, however, have a lot to do with union busting and corporations tapping into all that delicious tax payer education money.  It also thrives on propaganda. When discussing education today there's one theme that remains consistent:  Public education is failing our kids!  Our children aren't learning!  Just look at the test scores! Okay, let's look at the test scores:

• The chart below shows overall reading and math scores for 9-year-olds starting in the early '70s. Since then, reading scores have gone up 12 points and math scores have gone up 24 points. Ten points on the NAEP roughly equals one grade level, which means that today's 9-year-olds are performing more than a full grade level better in reading and two grade levels better in math compared to the '70s.
• Scores for blacks and Latinos are up more than scores for whites. In reading, as the chart above shows, white kids' scores are up 14 points, while Latinos' have risen 24 points and blacks' 34 points. In math, scores for white kids are up 25 points, while Latinos' have jumped 32 points and blacks' 34 points. There's still a significant gap between whites and other groups, but we've been making steady—and largely unheralded—progress for the past 40 years.
• Private schools have done well, with reading scores up 10 points and math scores up 22 points, but public schools have also improved in reading (4 points) and math (25 points). Overall, the rise in test scores is due to improvements at both private and public schools.

Interesting, no?  And yet you rarely, if ever, hear about these results.  Don't get me wrong.  There are problems, especially when children reach high school, and that must be addressed, but the idea that public schools aren't educating children is nothing more than the Ed Reformers' Marketing Strategy.