Three days ago Washington Post education columnist Valerie Strauss thought she was being clever by asking “Should we blame [private schools] for the mess America’s in?” because, yes, President Trump had attended private schools.
After all, she rationalizes, America the collective held its public education system culpable for the “Sputnik Effect” — our schools weren’t as good as the Soviet school system since the now-defunct USSR beat the United States into space not once, but twice: the first artificial satellite Sputnik in 1957 and the first man in space (Yuri Gagarin) in 1961.
Therefore, private education could also be blamed for our current chief exec’s alleged ineptitude:
Since becoming president, Trump has shown remarkable ignorance of U.S. history and how the government he heads actually works. So, if the public schools were responsible for the Sputnik debacle, are the private schools responsible for Trump’s ignorance? Or for his Helsinki debacle, when on Monday he stood next to Vladimir Putin, the authoritarian leader of Russia, and sided with him over U.S. intelligence services about Russian hacking of U.S. elections?
If anything, you certainly have to at least give Strauss points for originality.
But “if the question seems hyberolic,” she continues, so too is the notion that our schools were to blame for being beaten by the Soviets in the space race. “[O]r race riots, or a poor economy.”
“Schools simply don’t have a powerful effect like that; research shows that family attitudes do.”
“On nearly every single outcome that we can assess,” [the University of Virginia’s Robert Pianta] said, “public schools have a marginal impact that is really small relative to the impact of families. The things that we worry about in terms of the state of the country are far more a function of the families the kids are growing up in than the school they go to.”
Who knew? So basically polls like this, not to mention various research and common sense assertions, are back en vogue … and prove that all the money and effort spent to close “achievement gaps” are largely … a waste?
Maybe that graduate school professor a colleague of mine had twenty-plus years ago was right: One day after class he “unofficially” told my colleague “Give me the family background of a student and I’ll accurately predict how he’ll do in school and beyond.”
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