You know, I was going to do a “take that!” With some stories out of Chicago and baltimore, but doing the research for it has really made me realize just how partisan reporting on education is. You have lots of examples of really good schools in illinois, maryland, and even Texas, but everything talking about problems seems to be from one side of the political compass trying to get an own on the other side.

Some problems in public schools have nothing to do with the schools themselves, you have some of the best funded public School systems in the country but they’re fundamental social problems that you can’t fix with a classroom.

The literature is perfectly clear, that kids who grow up with a father in the home are better across a wide spectrum of measures then kids who grow up without a father, but one of the effects of poverty and the government program set up to alleviate poverty are often designed to break up families, and some black activists claim this has a disproportionate effect on black families.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3904543/

https://nationalcenter.org/project21/2014/01/08/lbjs-war-on-poverty-hurt-black-americans/

So I think that the reality is a lot more complicated than just dollars and cents, and more complicated than test scores and graduation rates. I’m not sure that either side of the political spectrum is doing right by kids. I just don’t see the evidence for it.