When I was assigned to be a Washington correspondent in 1994, I chose to move my young family to the northern Virginia suburb of Fairfax for a single reason: It had one of the best public school systems in the country. The reason wasn’t complicated: The starting salary for its teachers was among the highest in the nation, so the best young educators from across the nation competed fiercely for jobs.
As my son moved through elementary and secondary school, I found that the Fairfax school system’s reputation was well-deserved. Thanks to highly motivated and deeply committed teachers, he obtained an outstanding education that prepared him well for success in college.
My son’s experience mirrored my own. Growing up in a Detroit suburb of Holocaust survivors, I attended schools with excellent teachers who inspired and pushed my classmates and me to strive for knowledge and skills.
In the current political jargon, that’s my privilege — two generations of outstanding education at little cost to my parents or me beyond the property taxes we paid each year.
The drive for education standards, whether imposed by states or the federal government, is founded on a cruel fiction: If kids from poor families just applied themselves more; if their underpaid teachers just worked harder; if the standards for measuring progress were clearer and tougher — the problems in the classroom would vanish.