If Romeny and anyone else in the 1% wants to see a poor kid succeed, why not focus on lifting up the poorest to compete in a new world Global Marketplace? Much less expensive than the costs of eroding American strength and competitiveness.

Neither. Both have championed the cause of education and have failed miserably. However, you have to look at those who succeed and why they did it. Home life matters. I was the oldest of 5 from a poor family. Mom did not work, was not college educated but insured we got our homework done and that we were fed a noursihing meal prior to and after school. Our clothing was not the best but we made it out of high school and some to college or trade schools.

The deterioration of the family has led to poverty and there is no easy fix except that good people step up to the plate and lend a helping hand, being mentors and actually give back a little of what they have received. I do that and don’t mind doing it and I don’t mind opening up my wallet when I see a need and where I can see the results of my giving. But I do not favor any arm of the Government telling me I have to open up my wallet for something I have worked very hard for only to get the same pitiful results.

I do not believe for a second that either Romney, Obama or anyone else has all the answers but I also do not believe that Romney or anyone else in the “1%’ wants to see any poor kid not have a chance.

Robert Putnam’s research reveals that college-educated parents have upped the amount of time that they spend with their children 4X over the past several decades. High school-educated parents? Only a slight increase.

During roughly the same time period, the top 1% of earners’ income grew by 275%, while the poorest 5th grew by 18.3% (according to the CBO).

The difference between what high-income families can do to help academic achievement and what low-income families can offer is stark. As wages fall or stagnate – they have since the 60s – the more low-income children fall in grades, test scores, graduation rates, and moving on to college.

So you and I agree. Society needs to get its act together as family units. This means a higher standard for the lowest rung of our society – not handouts, but real family wage jobs. Which party do you think is interested in those policies?

Your story sounds more like a fish story. How long has our test scores, as compared to other nations, been going down? Since the 60′s, right? So we pump more money into it, we build bigger and more expensive schools, we lower class size, we give the teachers assistants ,we add school nurses and shrinks, we add after school programs, we add feeding programs before, during and after school . We demand our teachers be held accountable so we create this gigantic bureacracy that monitors these teachers to see that ‘they are doing their job’, we pay these administrators boo coo’s of money [after all they are educational experts] while the teachers get by on crumbs.

In the meantime the parents of these children are laid up in bed, producing more children, mostly without a supportive father and somehow these children from wrecked homes are put on the big brick of cheese and sent off to school.

Pour all the money you desire into schools and the end result will be the same as we have been seeing until society gets it’s act together as familly units. Until then look for resistance from taxpayers and an ever popular push on home and charter schools.

The Religious Right GOP faction wants to dismantle public education so that THEIR children can be educated without the taint of Evolution or other liberal nonsense.

Students who can’t afford private schools on limited vouchers in the UNITED States of America can go fish.

On the 2009 NAEP Reading Test, about 26 percent of eighth graders and 27 percent of twelfth graders scored below the “basic” level, and only 32 percent of eighth graders and 38 percent of twelfth graders are at or above grade level.

In the growing global marketplace, students will need to excel in both math and science to compete internationally as engineers, scientists, physicians, and creative entrepreneurs. Yet, in an assessment by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 15-year-olds in the U.S. placed 25th out of 30 countries in math performance and 21st in science performance.

In April 2009, Education Week reported that average math and reading scores for 17-year-olds in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests have remained stagnant since the 1970s. And according to The Journal, fourth- and eighth-grade reading scores “have barely budged since 1992,” despite policy and investment focused on improving overall student achievement.

Decades of public education control by liberal teachers unions and their tendency to reward mediocre performance of their members is one of the major reasons American children are unable to compete in the global economy. Many of these kids are functionally illiterate when they graduate. These are the ugly results of the destructive Left Wing philosophy called progressivism, which by all accounts is more aptly named regressivism.