Reply to Given the rigor of Basis, was it ever expected to be for every kid in the District?

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[quote=Anonymous]Isn't the reality of issue that we don't want to face the extrmeme effects of income inequality.  Sure you may not feel rich in ward 3 with your $800,000 colonial but you are still more well off than most of the country.  The reality is your educational attainment will be passed down to your child.  If you you are poor your deficits will also be passed down.  In my mind the real problem is that we treat too much of education as a set of skills so income inequality magnifies the problem.   I have thought we needed more content for a long time but this editorial does a better job a framing the changes than I can articulate.

Vocabulary Declines, With Unspeakable Results

For all the talk about income inequality in the United States, there is too little recognition of education's role in the problem. Yet it is no coincidence that, as economist John Bishop has shown, the middle class's economic woes followed a decline in 12th-grade verbal scores, which fell sharply between 1962 and 1980—and, as the latest news confirms, have remained flat ever since.
 
The federal government reported this month that students' vocabulary scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress have seen no significant change since 2009. On average, students don't know the words they need to flourish as learners, earners or citizens.
 
All verbal tests are, at bottom, vocabulary tests. To predict competence most accurately, the U.S. military's Armed Forces Qualification Test gives twice as much weight to verbal scores as to math scores, and researchers such as Christopher Winship and Anders D. Korneman have shown that these verbally weighted scores are good predictors of income level. Math is an important index to general competence, but on average words are twice as important.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444165804578010394278688454.html?mod=ITP_opinion_0[/quote]

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