State Of Education

I am just back after 13 1/2 hours on that movie set, from 6 am to 7:30 PM. It was quite a long day, but interesting. I saw a report from the Center on Education Policy today. It examined data from a 12 year period concerning whether kids in "better" private schools had an advantage over those kids who attended less prestigious public schools. And what did it conclude? It said that whether or not low-income, urban students or whether they attend a public or private high school matters less to their academic success than whether their parents take part in their education, earn enough money to offer enriching experiences and have high aspirations for their kids.
I am not surprised that outside school influences are so important. In fact, I have always felt that one learns much more outside of the school than within. Schools are basically skill mills, teaching basic skills humans must master to function. Beyond that (and most of that should be completed by 8th grade) there is little we learn while in a school. Certainly if we were to be asked to tell what we remembered from our school experiences, it would not be the academic material we "studied". It would more likely be the enrichment experiences we had outside of the classroom.
So while it is best to be in a good and safe school environment, outside influences like parental and family support, enriching activities outside of school, and old fashioned "play" may be more important. And if one can combine both the better school with the enrichment, real education takes place at its highest level.
Jane attends a private school, the same one I graduated from. I like the school because, though it has high standards, it is not a memorization mill and cares nothing about standardized tests (It does not even give the results the the parent or child unless the parents wishes to come to the school to obtain a copy of them). It teaches kids to think and to learn on their own. There is nothing better than a school that has equipped a student for life long learning and nothing worse than one that fills the student's heads with facts and information but little understanding of how to make use of them.
A problem in the U.S. is that in the past 25 years or so education has become the latter at the exclusion of the former. We now equate learning with the amount of information the child possesses and presents on standardized tests. We "teach the test" too often, and to ensure that goal we cram their heads with information that is useless or will be quickly outdated so those "test scores" will be higher. As a result we get kids who can recite more facts but lack creativity, imagination, inventiveness, humor and resourcefulness.
I think the decline of the old notion of "the clever American' is precisely because we attempted to (and badly) make our kids robots and forgot that knowledge is only one aspect of education, not the entirety.
Anyway............that's my opinion of the failing American educational system. I hope it changes and we again teach to think, not to merely recite for the next test.