Just so you know where I am coming from; I’m middle-class, college educated, and so is Mr Fly. I have a professional career that puts me near the top of wage-earners who don’t come from families named Hilton or Bush. I am basically the demographic that should have been living out in the ‘burbs for the “good schools”, or sending my kids to private school to keep them away from the riff-raff (non-white, non-English speaking). I didn’t and they are OK.

My kids started school in a large urban school district, my coworkers who lived in the subarbsb were horrified, thinking that was basically child abuse. We have since moved into the country and my daughter attends the same rural high school that my son just graduated from.

OK, OK, I did send them to a magnet school, not the neighborhood school. After looking at both programs, I felt the magnet program was a better fit for my kids. It was still a urban public school with a predominately non-white population and predominately lower middle class and below. This school, according to conventional wisdom, should have failed like the USA 4x100 relay teams. It didn’t, it’s one of the top schools in California.

Why? Because every day, those kids showed up ready to learn. Their parents made sure they were there on time, fed, with adequate sleep the night before. Whether or not they spoke English, or had any money, they valued that education. There were very few “social” issues, even from the kids who came from the gang-infested neighborhoods. All the teacher had to do, for the most part, was show up and teach. And, ya know something? They did. Oh, sure some did it better than others, but they all did it. It was, according to several of the teachers and easy school to teach at, despite the cruddy ethnic/economic profile.

It’s been my experience, from my admittedly small sample size, that the public schools are actually doing OK given what they have to work with. If you go to school and want to learn, you will, simple as that. If you have ground down by grinding poverty and hopelessness, the schools can’t fix that.

I’ll put forth a radical idea: schools are not the problem, they are simply a reflection of the society in which we live. We don't value education. When the guy who went to Harvard is sneered at for actually having gone to Harvard, because he’s “elite”, what message are we sending? Tip: it’s not grow up and go Harvard. It’s not even grow up and go to college. Kids are smart, and they have seen right through us.

We say we want strong schools, but as a country we simply don’t have the intestinal fortitude to do the heavy lifting. We don’t want to fund the schools properly, we mock teachers and other educated folks. We don’t want to give each kid a leg up, because we really don’t give a shit, when it comes right down to it. Until we do, we can tlak all we want, but it’s not going to help.