The Sideshow on the myth of the failing public school system:
The sentence I’ve added emphasis to spells it out for you: Whites, who are proportionately less likely to be in poverty (although there are still more poor white people in America than any other kind), generally have access to better, wealthier school systems and do very well, thank you very much. While America’s poor (and blacks are disproportionately poor) are so deprived of that same privilege that it dramatically drags the national averages down, most of us get a pretty good education compared to the rest of the world.
So when you hear about how America’s schools “don’t work” and right-wingers try to tell you that public schooling should be abandoned as a result, don’t let them snow you. Voucher programs are, of course, a distraction meant to facilitate that destruction of yet another national treasure, but what they really want to do is extend both the degree and proportion of poverty and poor education in America to every family that can’t afford to have their children privately educated. (And they really like the fact that, at the low-end, the most affordable private schooling is in religious institutions.)
