Depending whom you ask, you’ll hear that the problem is too little money. Or it’s too . . .

Andrew J. Rotherham Forget Wall Street. Go Occupy Your Local School District has a convenient listing of root causes of school education failures:

Depending whom you ask, you’ll hear that the problem is too little money. Or it’s too much money and too little performance. Or poverty. Or lack of standards. Or lousy curriculum. Or teacher effectiveness. Or archaic rules and regulations. Or lack of innovation. Or lack of choice. Or too much power in the hands of the teachers unions. Or too little power in the hands of teachers.

To which I would add some other commonly ascribed root causes such as poor facilities, administration bloat, too much testing, unaligned culture, family environment, too little time in school, too long a summer break, family demographics (single parent), poor role models, etc.

All of these are potential root cuases, and all will prove to be actual root causes in some instances. But not all of them are equally contributive to poor results all the time, everywhere. And some of them are masks for the real underlying issues. Poverty is not itself the cause of poor results but some of the burdens of poverty are - the trick is to identify those specific burdens and address them rather than the nebulous concept of poverty. A rigorous root cause analysis of systemic poor results will force some unpleasant truths to be faced but we cannot move forward until we quit chasing generic chimera and start tackling concrete problems.