The Washington Free Beacon's Ellison Barber compared and contrasted global and U.S. education stats with ChoiceMedia.TV's Bob Bowdon Tuesday on TheBlaze TV.
Bowdon, a filmmaker whose online media enterprise focuses on exposing waste, fraud and corruption in public school systems, gave perspective on the recent PISA stats which rank world education systems.
Barber noted America's low performance on the test actually extends across socioeconomic backgrounds, as poor performance from lower income school districts would not be enough to account for the discrepancies alone. Bowdon concurred in his reply, adding there upper middle class school districts across the country who do not lack resources yet are failing academically.
"This is an extremely point that cannot be made enough," Bowdon said. "There are suburban schools all around this country where there isn't crime, maybe, a lot, [...] and everything seems nice, and therefore the parents are misled to think that the kids are getting a world standard education, and indeed they're not."
Bureaucratic mismanagement and teachers unions, according to Bowdon, shoulder the primary blame.
