In Public School Efforts, a Common Background: Private Education

In this article it discusses the corruption of opinions in congress who are making laws and trying to reform public schools. The No Child Left Behind law was passed during the Bush administration which made public schools take standardized test every year to test the school rather it is good or bad. If a school failed to reach its goal in the number of students to pass the test they are label as a failing school. One thing this article brings up, is that the people who are in charge of making our schools better all came from private schools. Michelle Obama is one of the many people who speak out against the standardized test "If my future were determined by my performance on a standardized test...I wouldn’t be here, I guarantee that.”. Bill Gates has donated billions of dollars to the public schooling systems in hope to help reform the system. He suggested that public schools make the class size bigger and have a great teacher teach the students to cut down the cost for the schools. Yet Bill Gates comes from a school that usually has a class size of 16 and who stressed the importance of a teacher and student relationship. Not only does this argument brings up the bias of opinions of our government towards schools, but it also makes you think about other issues our government makes laws on but have no experience or knowledge of the issue except for facts and numbers.


Does a private school background give them a much-needed distance and fresh perspective to better critique and remake traditional public schools? Does it make them distrust public schools — or even worse — poison their perception of them? Or does it make any difference? (questions brought up in the article)



Are facts,statistics, and concern for a budget enough for our government to make a respectable and successful decision on anything in our country? Such as the rich making laws about the poor, the educated making laws on the non educated, those who are covered by health care making laws on those who are not.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/18/education/18winerip.html?pagewanted=2&ref=todayspaper