People keep writing about the failure of our schools. This Town Hall article is an example. Arguments are over more money or less, testing or creative teaching, higher standards or not, parent choice of charter or public schools.
All of these miss the point. Our schools do poorly because of the students they must teach. If you imagine a school as a factory, turning out products (graduates), a key ingredient is the quality of the raw material with which it must work - the students.
As the proportion of children from one parent homes goes up to 80% and more in some neighborhoods - the proportion with no fathers or temporary "fathers" or " uncles" - the quality of school output (graduates) goes down not just a little but dramatically. Asking the schools to make "silk purses" out of these "sows' ears" is unrealistic - it doesn't happen. In all likelihood it can't happen.
Children are being raised by grandparents or even great-grandparents, being raised by foster homes, by crack whore mothers, by abusive alcoholic fathers. They live in families where no two children have the same father and none has lived with a father, it's a mess.
Society assumes that if a child is fed semi-regularly (often at school), wears clothes, and isn't too sick or dirty, the child will learn - nonsense. Such children have enough to survive, but not enough to thrive, and they don't thrive, don't succeed.
We blame the schools. We should blame the society.
