Public schools, in the eyes of different beholders

This from David Hawpe in the Courier Journal:

The easiest thing in the world to concoct is alarmist rhetoric about American education.

Any bad news about U.S. schools is seen as more evidence of America's decline, particularly now, with the prematurely designated Unipower in such reduced circumstances and gleeful detractors already debating whether India or China will succeed to world leadership.

The disparagement and denunciation of the country's public schools, in particular, has been relentless during the Reagan era, as Republicans used their political platforms to claim moral superiority (they insisted friends of public education were guilty of "the soft bigotry of low expectations") as well as superior policy insight (they deemed it absurd to abandon inner city children to the misfeasance of unionized faculties at non-market-driven schools).

Of course, that awful era -- in which free market competition was deemed the answer to any and all problems, no matter how many victims it made - is mercifully coming to an end.

The irony is that conservative intellectuals, who desperately wanted to promote Ronald Reagan as their answer to Franklin D. Roosevelt, now are faced with explaining how the era named for their hero has ended in the same kind of economic disaster that FDR was elected to clean up...

...We all should hope that the NCLB changes being worked out in Washington, and any changes made by the 2009 General Assembly in the Kentucky accountability system, follow the rule they teach in medical school: First, do no harm.

As for me, when weighed down by alarmist rhetoric I turn to the list of destinations for last year's Jefferson County Public Schools seniors. They're all there, from the Ivy League redoubts and "highly selective" out-of-state private and public campuses to the best in-state schools. And no one JCPS high school has a corner on competitive admissions, although some do produce more than others.

That's not the way to judge school systems, but it does confound the rhetoric of public schools' belittlers.