meanwhile your downtowns and your bottom 98% rot before your very eyes, and instead of helping them, they're told to try harder and be more competitive.

Children have no problem with empathy - there's actually been a lot of science demonstrating this. We lose it over time, though. It's why kids who get along great on a playground somehow can't in adulthood.

There's hard work and then there's just doing hard work for no point. I graduated second in my class without really trying because it was a small rural school where half the girls were pregnant at graduation or shortly thereafter and no one cared. In college I briefly joined a "honors college" program with harder…

Before you summarily dismiss my argument, learn about the Mexican economy beyond a few cursory stereotypes. The country is dominated by some highly concentrated mega-corporations that stifle competition and, with less competition, keep consumer prices higher and ensure that fewer good paying jobs exist at all. …

You sound just like every kid I have ever taught that asks questions that are answered directly in the directions. Did you read them? Nah.

Hahaha, I like that one. GPA is the most thrown around inflated stat right now. Whenever a student/parents starts with GPA thrown in there, I know exactly what kind of student he/she is.

—test scores have never been higher, despite what you may have heard—

Are you a teacher or involved in education? Standardized teaching is a really good metric to measure how a student can take a test. That's pretty much it. You're view isn't incorrect, it's just not relative. Is testing better than nothing? Yes...but barely.

I imagine it's becoming more competitive just as the middle class is evaporating in the U.S. Everyone wants to believe that "hard work" will give them a privileged spot in the 1%, but life isn't like the movies. The system is set up to give people vain hope so that they'll support policies that enrich the few at the…

If you didn't finish the article, how can you be sure your points aren't addressed? Why even comment at all if you didn't get through the whole thing?

Most of the world runs because of a small fraction of people who make things and keep things running. The rest of us are reaping the benefits of their ingenuity and labour.

Drew twice mentioned US News. And therein lies one of the problems. My oldest starts college in a few weeks. She may have looked on her own, but US News "rankings" were not part of any discussion I was inolved in. But it was definitely part of some of her friends'. US News rankings are bullshit not tied to anything…

Hey, look! Ayn Rand has a Burner account!

Is this a thing again? Please tell me that this is not a thing again.

We're competitive, we're just not very good.

Wow. That was impressive. Was it a competition to see who could publish the longest article on Gawker today? If so I bet you win. That is the longest article I've ever seen. Unfortunately it was a good article which means when my ADD kicked in I probably missed some interesting stuff.

It's absurd to assume what works in a homogeneous population of 5.5 million can work for our clusterfuck of cultures and peoples at 314 million. When many of the cultures common in our country put zero importance, to the point of a negative stigma, on education an egalitarian approach is doomed for failure.

Gaussian burn!

Well, it's pretty easy to focus on equality when equality is a viable goal for the students that are put in the classroom together.

I knew Glenn Burke when he played with the Dodgers. I was a sports reporter/ photographer for a S.F. gay newspaper. During the off season,Glenn was to play in a Charity Basketball game between gay athletes and S.F. Firemen. At a practice I came around to photograph the gay players. Glenn asked me not to photographed…