I spent a lifetime as a management professor and one of the things I absorbed from that body of lore is the idea that the quality of raw materials input strongly influences the quality of manufactured output. You cannot manufacture fine furniture from scrap wood. Colloquially, you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.
I think there is little evidence that our K-12 teachers are worse than they were 50 years ago. And class sizes then were large, too. The one variable within which there has arguably been the most change is the pupils, not genetically, but environmentally and culturally.
The ways most children are raised today are substantially different from the way they were raised 50 years ago. Or they come from subcultures with less positive attitudes toward education. Or both. In other words, perhaps the public school system is dealing with a higher proportion of "sow's ears" than they once did.
It seems reasonable to me that, if we are serious about improving public school education, we should investigate the impact of various student input variables, however politically incorrect such investigations may be.
