Is the educational system in the U.S. essentially ineffective.?

Some of our schools are very good and some are bad, but most are better that they use to be. The problem is that over half now attend collage and so we expect more from our schools, but because of the drop in the birth rate of middle class women , 1/3 of our children are poor and our schools were design to educate the middle class and they do not do well in educating the poor.

Most of the people who campaign about our school were educated in them, but do not think their education was bad.

Pubic schools probably do a middling job of preparing the bulk of average people to live average lives, but they too often tend to fail to help the smartest cohort of students to achieve their potential. They generally fail to teach the fundamentals well enough, and fail to teach many basic things that adults should know because the curricula are captive to special interests.

Regarding what Meg says - I for one think I was poorly served by my public school education, despite being a smart and motivate enough student to get accepted to prestigious universities (by my own late and naive efforts with zero guidance or help from the school). And once at one of these famous colleges I struggled far more than I should have as I discovered I didn't have a good enough foundation in several fundamental areas.

Many economically-inclined people want more competition among schools, where students and parents can shop around to get better education. In just about every other human endeavor it is very advantageous to have competition, where the productive succeed and the incompetent fail, or else learn how to emulate the productive ones. This is obvious to everyone but for some reason with government-monopoly schools we turn off our brains and think the rules don't apply and that the status quo must be perpetuated.

The point of competition really is that, it's HARD to figure out how best to do things. Many people will never figure it out. You need a process of discovery where many people are working at different approaches and then the magic happens, someone stumbles on the ideas that change the world. So while the staff at schools A, B, C, D, E, and F keep insisting it's impossible to do a better job of educating, the staff at school G figures out how to do it. They become the school everyone wants to go to, and the others learn their lesson or go out of business.

Perhaps it's not so much the educational system that's ineffective. As it is a lot of families in USA who are ineffective in bringing up their children.

There are a lot of single mothers, a lot of divorced families, and a lot of kids who don't get good parental care. A single mother with kids usually doesn't have much time to look after the kids and earn a living too. Kids like that often spend a lot of time without much adult supervision. And the single mother without the presence of the father often cannot discipline the kids effectively.

USA has a significantly higher divorce rate and single parenthood than other western countries have. And this probably is the main reason why so many US kids don't do well in school.

According to the article below, 70% of African-American children are born out of wedlock. And this statistic alone probably explains a lot why so many African-American children don't do well in school.

http://racerelations.about.com/od/parentingrace/a/...

Without their fathers, these kids get only half of the parenting other kids get. And that's probably why these kids don't do well in school and in life when they grow up.