I'm on your side, I think. Some should skip a big chunk of it.

EDIT: My first comment to you is mostly in agreeance with you. I think it's inarguable that school fails SOME kids, because no compulsory system is perfect. But I took your statement of "are schools really failing kids" to mean "are schools really failing the majority or even all kids" or something similar (are schools failing the most important kids for some value of "important", etc).

That doesn't seem to make it more clear, but hell, I'm trying to vigorously agree with you.

Second response: I'm not sure I really answered your concern head-on, so I'll respond again. There's a widespread belief that American schools are fundamentally broken in some way, which has led them to provide inadequate educations. So, that would be basically all kids, with allowances that some kids will probably learn on their own and succeed anyway, and some schools are probably way above average. But the perception is that schools aren't doing a good enough job of preparing kids to succeed as adults. (I wonder if they have considered that ignorance = bliss.)

Maybe that was directed at me. I'm disagreeing with the conventional wisdom that schools are failing kids. I don't know exactly in what way people think it's failing them, but it's such a part of common wisdom that all you have to say is that schools are failing kids and lots of people will agree with you.

That idea could be on to something. I guess it would have to be tried to see what happens.

I think what people really want is the economy to be better, and since the economy isn't what it used to be, the popular theory is that at some point, the education system got infected with some disease and started to fail kids, causing the bad economy. When the economy was humming, I doubt many people thought the education system failed those kids. The simpler explanation is that the education system was in a relatively steady state and the economy just went bad.