Where Our Schools Could Use Help

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Think of Gerald W. Bracey as education's Chicken Little, except that his insistent - and endlessly ignored - warning is that the sky is not falling. American schools, he said again the other day, are not only doing as well as they ever have but also rank quite well in international comparisons.

He knows you don't believe that. Hardly anyone does - including President Bill Clinton who, in his State of the Union Address, called for a massive campaign to fix what, in Bracey's informed opinion, isn't broken.

"Consider his reading initiative," he says by way of illustration. "In the most recent international comparison of reading skills, American students finished …