Good News About Public Schools

Kudos to Brian Cleary whose article Good News about Public Schools ws printed in this week's edition of Ed Week.

Mr. Cleary's article included some great stats about positive things with public education that people never here.  These included:
About 90 percent of the kids in the United States go through the public school system.
The literacy rate in the United States is 99 percent for those age 15 and older.
Most of our recent presidents—from both parties—were largely products of public education, including Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, and Richard Nixon.

I often say that we (in public education) spend 90% of our time worrying about 10% of the students.  They seems to be endless attention on the students who aren't successful and very little attention on the students that are successful.  Of course we want everyone to be successful, and of course we want to do everything we can to help all of our students.  But let's not forget the good; the positive; the many, many successes that occur in public schools everyday.

And it's particularly nice (and unfortunately rare) to see it in print.