This is my take: the real issue with education in the US goes back to trying to square two ideals.
One is the meritocracy[0]. I believe that No Child Left Behind Act was sold to the public as a way to promote meritocracy in education and having some reasonably unbiased[1] way of doing so. The foundation of which is a way for parents to hold institutions responsible much more easily[2][3]
The other is social and political stratification. This isn't merit based. Good examples of this would be the history of slavery, Jim Crow laws, the formerly legal practice of segregation by race, the drawing school district lines that keep students of wealthy parents away from folks who come from less economically advantaged backgrounds and enforcing this with district based school eligibility and funding.
These two don't exactly square very well. Which is why the top level idea sold to the public - meritocracy - is used to sell these policies, but in practice they are using it to pull levers to further political and social stratification.
[0]: Americans generally have a positive view of the term. I personally believe that most people don't have a proper understanding of the term to begin with, nor conceive what issues it could have in practice if they were given it.
[1]: Leaving out the other half of the narrative, which is how much macro and micro levels of a students environment will influence how well they learn.
[2]: Which made it easier for Republicans to continue to go after public education. They've been pushing for the voucher system for decades as a backdoor way to dismantle the public school system, reasons for wanting to do so vary but it all converges on this point.
[3]: Not to mention, it completely ignores micro and macro issues that students can have, be it poverty, domestic issues, systemic issues and a whole host of other things.
> Which made it easier for Republicans to continue to go after public education. They've been pushing for the voucher system for decades as a backdoor way to dismantle the public school system, reasons for wanting to do so vary but it all converges on this point.
in practice, republicans are perfectly happy with public schools when the schools are are "good enough" for their kids. so this caricature seems incorrect. there's a lot wrong with USA public schools, so something must be done. some very not-for-profit voucher schools have been doing excellent work where the public school systens have utterly failed, for example green dot animo in inglewood, or, dramatically, green dot locke in watts.
what is not a caricature: the vast majority of policymakers who want to keep status quo in the public school system send their kids to private schools.
you can make an evidenced argument that elected officials of the Democratic party have been systematically destroying public education for decades (for example cancelling algebra in California, repeat child abusers not let go in LAUSD, see "mark berndt" for an example of a multidecade offender that bounced between schools)
really, Republicans arent helping, but they arent necessary to destroy American schools thats happening just fine in ~one-party democrat states like California and hawaii.
Republicans are not perfectly happy when public schools are good enough ... they seek to defund them and vilify them anyway. Their complains have very little to do with reality of those schools and a lot to do with the project of privatization. Plus, you see conservatives who send their kids to private schools or home school to attack libraries in public schools.
One is the meritocracy[0]. I believe that No Child Left Behind Act was sold to the public as a way to promote meritocracy in education and having some reasonably unbiased[1] way of doing so. The foundation of which is a way for parents to hold institutions responsible much more easily[2][3]
The other is social and political stratification. This isn't merit based. Good examples of this would be the history of slavery, Jim Crow laws, the formerly legal practice of segregation by race, the drawing school district lines that keep students of wealthy parents away from folks who come from less economically advantaged backgrounds and enforcing this with district based school eligibility and funding.
These two don't exactly square very well. Which is why the top level idea sold to the public - meritocracy - is used to sell these policies, but in practice they are using it to pull levers to further political and social stratification.
[0]: Americans generally have a positive view of the term. I personally believe that most people don't have a proper understanding of the term to begin with, nor conceive what issues it could have in practice if they were given it.
[1]: Leaving out the other half of the narrative, which is how much macro and micro levels of a students environment will influence how well they learn.
[2]: Which made it easier for Republicans to continue to go after public education. They've been pushing for the voucher system for decades as a backdoor way to dismantle the public school system, reasons for wanting to do so vary but it all converges on this point.
[3]: Not to mention, it completely ignores micro and macro issues that students can have, be it poverty, domestic issues, systemic issues and a whole host of other things.