Jeb Bush's Education Vision
The National Review has given Bush a platform with "Saving America's Education System" (though the URL reads, weirdly, "jeb-bush-education-school-reform-future-disruption-technology"), and it presents one more re-vision of unapologetic reformsterism. So now that Bush has gotten the band back together, will he play some of his greatest hits for us? Let's see.
Don't Throw Money
One of our favorites kicks in in the very first sentence, where Bush notes that the school year has now ended and "another $620 billion has been spent." He follows that up immediately with the observation that we spend more money on education than almost any other industrialized nation. But we still have achievement gaps. Also, Bush will throw in the most bogus of bogus statistics, saying that "only 8 percent of high school grads are truly college and career ready."
That's wrong for several reasons. First, the Education Trust report from which he plucks that statistic actually says that "only 8 percent of high school graduates in 2013 completed a full college- and career-prep curriculum." That is a bizarrely demanding definition of college and career ready that would, for just one example, rule out a student who attended a CTE welding program. But then, Education Trust is a Gates-funded, reform-pushing advocacy group, so it's not surprising that they would push a statistic that is so easily debunked (are 92% of college freshmen in remedial courses and/or flunking out because they were unprepared for college?)
Of course, we don't really know, still, what college and career ready look like. We have no proven CURMUDGUCATION: Jeb Bush's Education Vision: