Educational Recession

David Sirota had a piece on Salon yesterday, in which he claimed that two distinct camps seem to be emerging in the debate over future education policy. And Sirota firmly sides with one of these camps. The side that he privileges and takes to be uniquely supported by research data claims, in his words,

"that larger social ills such as poverty, joblessness, economic despair and lack of health coverage negatively affect educational achievement, and that until those problems are addressed, schools will never be able to produce the results we want."

Those on the other side, Sirota says, "want to radically change (read: charterize and/or privatize) public education under the premise that the primary problems are bad/lazy teachers and 'unaccountable' school administrators."