In Rothstein’s article, I liked the following quote: “Mythology also prevents educators from properly diagnosing educational failure where it exists. If we expect all disadvantaged students to succeed at levels typical of affluent students, then even the best inner-city teachers seem like failures. If we pretend that achievement gaps are entirely within teachers’ control, with claims to the contrary only “excuses,” how can we distinguish better from worse classroom practice?”

My questions are:
California public schools are required by law to have all 9th grade students take Algebra (as the minimum level course). What if the student in a newcomer to the U.S. and has only had education to a third grade level in her/his country of origin? How helpful can that be to the student and to the other kids in the class?
How helpful is it to a student, who is or isn’t disadvantaged, to be passed to the next level of math education when he/she has only a tentative grasp on the subject?
How is it that schools continue to track kids by age instead of by ability?
The result of these policies is that we have dumbed-down the mathematics curriculum to the point where the U.S. ranks 24th of 29 developed nations in math education.

I’m planning on a Ph.D. one of these days. I’m wondering if a dissertation would be illuminating that studies the degree to which “high flyer schools” actually offset societal ills, completely independent of instruction. How many of them insulate their kids from crime and drugs via hugely extended days? How many of them have what amounts to an underground supplemental health care system– lead screening, in-school physicals? How far do they go above and beyond the classroom to expose kids to more reading, more adult “utterances”? How many of them *feed* the kids at least two of their three meals, for crying out loud?

I’d to put something on the table that actually presents systematic hard data on how a representative sample of these schools are, in fact, creating an *alternate society* for these children. (And it seems to me, without having studied the topic in detail, that the degree to which this is happening is a new and extremely significant development in public education). Thoughts?