Tough to miss over the weekend were two pieces--one in the New York Times, the other in the Wall Street Journal--about high-achieving high school students and their struggles. (Such students, the Times tells us, do not eat lunch.) Columnist Anne Applebaum rightly points out in today's Washington Post that similar stories appear each spring, without fail, and that they provide vivid contrasts to??articles about America's thousands of high school dropouts. It seems clear that a two-tiered (or three-, four-, or five-tiered) public education system exists--has always existed--and that the tiers are growing farther apart. Far less clear is why so many are unwilling to recognize it. They abstain from reality by??not offering classes of different difficulty levels (thus the hasty push to get more kids into AP courses, for instance); by denying??the benefits of quality career and technical education; and by insisting that most, if not all, students should (must!) go to college. But this approach just isn't a smart one. To paraphrase: You have to reform the education system you've got, not the education system you wish you had. Doing otherwise can exacerbate the??trends one is attempting to mitigate.
