This article reveals a shaky grasp of statistics and demographics. For instance: >Since when has diversity and more students taking the test become a legitimat

This article reveals a shaky grasp of statistics and demographics. For instance: >Since when has diversity and more students taking the test become a legitimate excuse for bad scores? Actually, diversity is a very big factor. Especially language diversity. Bilingual households have proliferated dramatically in the last few decades, and bilingual students have placed enormous strains on already resource-poor public schools trying to push standardized curricula on increasingly large classes of students. And you'd fully expect to see English test scores declining, on average, as more English-as-a-second-language students start entering the test-taking population. >A conservative certainly could not get away with blaming falling test scores on diversity. Imagine the outcry. Ugh. Here he's conflating "diversity" the political buzzword with diversity the demographic measurement. No one is "blaming" diversity for declining performance, or claiming that we don't want diverse students to succeed. Diversity is a great thing. But it can have a very real, though hopefully corrigible, effect on test metrics. You're going to see some lower median scores as we wait for ESL/bilingual populations to acculturate over a generation or two. That's a fact of our demography, not a value judgment on said demography. >As the United States increases education spending, our students' scores should not be getting worse. Perhaps, but this begs for further analytical consideration. First of all, is educational spending actually increasing year over year, accounting for inflation? If so, where is it being allocated? Bear in mind that population is also increasing, and as it increases (and as its demography shifts), it's going to place increasing strains on the public schooling system. Has the school system grown in accordance with population growth? I would find that very hard to believe, especially with all the budget cuts at the national, state, and local level over the last five or six years. >"The solution, Brill says, is to overhaul the public school education system in order to motivate and inspire better teachers." That's a fine and dandy solution on a case-by-case basis, but is it scalable? Do we have the resources, and will the demographics support, a scaling up of the Harlem Success I story? Do we even have enough great teachers to ensure that every student in a growing population is served by great teachers? The school system needs thorough reconsideration, and perhaps even an "overhaul." But what's the rollout plan? Theory is great, but what about implementation? What's the halfway point between naively idealistic and depressingly pragmatic?