re: #134 Amory Blaine

Comparing cities with millions of poor people to teach with a rural state of less than one million total is disingenuous at best and incredibly naive at worst.

Those same poor people do far better when given a chance at a voucher, or at a public school where the principle and the teachers are on the ball. They perfectly well can learn to read and write. They can perfectly well learn their times table. Look at what Michelle Rhee is doing in DC. The abysmal results posted in that city prior to her work were not destiny, they were the fruit of bad policy.

Now Ms. Rhee isn’t going to be able to work miracles and bring DC schools to the front of the pack, outshining say Montgomery Blair HS in Silver Springs, MD. But they are much improved already, and there is clearly room for further improvement. To the extent that there is room for major improvement within feasible budget constraints, to that extent the current pattern of failure is indeed the responsibility of the schools.

How shall we compare Republican run schools to Democrat, when Democrats run all the big city systems and always have? The excuse that no better results are possible, given who they have to teach, is both demeaning and flies in the face of the evidence from results achieved in parochial schools and in public schools where a real effort has been made to turn things around.