Submitted by Haim, Sep 29, 2008 02:11

Andrew Wolf has done valuable service for this city with his excellent writing on education. Furthermore, everything he writes, in this article, about the need for effective instruction is both true and important. And yet, he has missed a couple of big, really big, public policy objectives that inform every aspect of public education. First, it is an organic fact that half of all children are below average. If it is the policy of this city, and state, to graduate everyone from high school, it is a mathematical impossibility to have anything that remotely resembles high standards in the schools. Quite to the contrary. The second major policy objective is to reduce The Gap in achievement between high achievers and low achievers. Yes, of course, the implication is that we want to improve the academic condition of the low achievers, but this "policy objective" is a pious hope whose realization is completely outside the powers of the schools to deliver. The only way to decrease The Gap is to reduce over-all achievement: when every school child knows nothing, there will be no difference between high achievers and low achievers. Indeed, as a society we have been working on getting everyone through high school and reducing The Gap since about 1960, with no appreciable success. Effective classroom instruction, a very desirable thing, will amount to nothing in the face these self-defeating public policy objectives.

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