NYU professor Pedro Noguera was a guest on Leonard Lopate’s radio show yesterday, discussing the topic “Can Public Education Save America’s Kids?” In the final minutes of the interview, Noguera, a co-chair of the “Broader, Bolder” committee, found a way to wrap its platform into the conversation, which otherwise careened through hot topics such as mayoral control, No Child Left Behind, and Barack Obama. Suggesting that public education has goals beyond raising test scores, Noguera said:
Every time we do these international comparisons with other countries [ie. NAEP] … our kids are always far behind. But we never ask why — what are those countries doing that we’re not doing? … Part of it is because it’s not all on the schools. They have health care in Canada. They have preschool in Canada. They have parental leave in Canada and in Norway and in Sweden. We have to say, why aren’t our kids getting that kind of support? Why aren’t our families getting that kind of support? Because we can’t expect schools to solve all of these problems by themselves and that’s a big part of the reason why we continue to see such pervasive failure.
You can listen to the whole interview online.