As your editor made clear in this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast and as this publication consistently points out, there are no corners of American public education that are cordons solitaire from the education crisis. From the so-called gifted-and-talented programs that end up doing little to improve student achievement (and actually do more damage to all kids by continuing the rationing of education at the heart of the education crisis), to the evidence that suburban districts are hardly the bastions of high-quality education they proclaim themselves to be (and often, serve middle class white children as badly as those from poor and minority households), it is clear that the educational neglect and malpractice endemic within the nation’s super-clusters of failure and mediocrity isn’t just a problem for other people’s children.
So it isn’t surprising that Harvard University’s latest report on the performance of American high school sophomores on the latest edition of PISA shows that kids from college-educated households are lagging behind their peers around the world. The data once again serves as a reminder that educational malpractice borne upon poor and minority children visit their better-off peers in the form of academic neglect.