There are reasons for optimism

McKinsey & Company have recently released a new report, The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in America's Schools. McKinsey is one of those organizations that generally invests a good deal of time, money and intellectual effort into producing insightful reports (for example, see Education Knowledge Highlights.) In this instance their primary conclusions are not particularly controversial: there is large variation in performance between schools and between school systems across the US, there are large variations in performance based on demographics, that the US education system is inefficient in terms of resources consumed for results produced compared to other countries, and that there is a high economic cost to the nation based on scholastic underperformance. Heroically, they attempt to quantify that cost (in the hundreds of billions up to the low trillions depending on assumptions and baselines chosen.)

While their numbers are certainly wrong, given the weakness of the underlying data, they at least provide a ballpark estimate. I am also reasonably sceptical of the comparability of the data they use for comparing US versus other countries (Program for International Student Assessment, PISA).

McKinsey's themes are limited, undramatic and straight-forward: better data is required, funding is an issue, minorities are ill-served and schools are important. They properly emphasize that there are reasons for optimism and that there are plenty of avenues to explore that hold out the prospect for material progress.

The weakness of the report, from my perspective, relates to the international comparisons as mentioned above; the disconnect between the supposed comparisons and the economic productivity of the US (if the US has been performing so dismally on education for the past 30 years, how is it that the US economy has performed so comparatively well versus the nominal educational superstars?); and finally, the dearth of recommendations (how do you optimize results within the constraints of the US circumstances?) The report is a worthwhile addition to the overall literacy and education literature. There were a couple of insights that you won't see anywhere else such as:

As a rule, schools in poor neighborhoods spend far less per pupil than schools in their nearby affluent suburbs. Since teacher salaries are one of the biggest components of district cost structures, affluent districts routinely outbid poorer ones for the best teaching talent (in addition to offering typically better working conditions and easier-to-teach children).