It’s Political Incompetence, Not Public Education

The unending cacophony of stories of public education failure and a need to reform it for the future has been ongoing since before the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB, 2002). Education bureaucrats, pundits, business profiteers, and policymakers dispense fraudulent claims about how the performance of teachers, school administrators, students, higher education faculty, and parents are causing economic Armageddon for the United States. State and federal policymakers, appointed bureaucrats and some business elites claim a need to save America’s children from ineffective teachers and lazy school administrators through education corporatization, privatization, centralization, and curricular standardization of public education via programs like the Common Core State Standards, and national testing. But who is failing whom? The stories of public education failure by those who view education from a quarterly profit margin standpoint do not hold up well to empirical scrutiny. In this writing, I use the 2013-2014 rankings and data from the World Economic Forum ([WEF], Schwab, 2013) and the Programme for International Student Assessment ([PISA] OECD, 2014) that question the claims of (a) the impending cataclysmic decline of U.S. economic performance and (b) the accusation that public school educators are to blame for any economic shortcomings in the U.S. economy. I argue that it is ineffective political and bureaucratic leadership that is really to blame for any economic issues faced by the U.S.

by Christopher Tienken.  See the full article here.