Not My Preferred Ally

http://america.aljazeera.com/watch/shows/talk-to-al-jazeera/interviews-and-more/2013/12/10/m-night-shyamalantalkstoalivelshi.html

While I am not a fan of overrated hack M. Night Shamalamadingdong's recent movies, he does make a very good point and one that needs to be repeated.

The public schools in this country are great.  As long as you are affluent or even middle class.  If you are poor - especially inner city poor - then they don't work.

And all the Michelle Rhees in the world aren't worth anything but a little more smug self-satisfaction, if you don't address the issues of poverty and the social ills that accompany poverty.

Here is the nut 'graph.
And what's interesting is, we always think about Finland, right? Well, Finland, obviously, is mainly white kids, right? They teach their white kids really well. But guess what, we teach our white kids even better. We beat everyone. Our white kids are getting taught the best public-school education on the planet. Those are the facts. 

Which means if you take the suburban, well-off white kids out of the picture and you now then just take the inner-city, mostly minority schools ... 

We're probably at the bare bottom, I imagine, because you can see the United States has education apartheid. 

Education apartheid.  That's a bit harsh, but it gets to the point that we have two separate systems.  And when students come into a school at age 5 or 6 already stressed beyond belief by the circumstances of being poor, having one parent, having one parents who is an addict... That's not something the schools can fix.

There are some other interesting ideas.  I urge you to click through.