Bill Murchison is a Senior Columns writer for The Dallas Morning News. He recently wrote a good column about some of the problems with public schools in Texas, and the US.
The Texas Legislature is convening a special session to "fix" public education. But Bill points out that problem is "We've been 'reforming' the public schools for two decades..." The results are dismal. For example: "... 35 percent of entry-level job applicants do not meet eighth-grade skill levels on a competency test administered by Texas Instruments." After spending around a hundred thousand dollars to send a student through public school, from kindergarten to 12th grade, many of them still can't do eight-grade work.
Bill says that years ago public education use to work, back when "Government wasn't yet an instrument for the leveraging of social change and economic redistribution." In the old days "A student could fail in the old schools. He can fail in the new ones, also, except that government doesn't let it show." (Look back at the paragraph above, the public schools are failing to teach about a third of the students.)
It is a good column, though sobering.
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