"They Didn’t Alter Its Class Structure, but Reproduced It"

"For the last forty years, the American economy has become increasingly bifurcated between a highly-educated, well-paid professional/managerial/white collar group and a poorly educated, poorly paid proletariat, largely composed of service workers. (In his new book, The Great Divergence: America's Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It, my colleague Timothy Noah has a good discussion of this divide.) The schools reflect this, if imperfectly. There are still middling mediocre schools, such as those my daughters attended, but the school system nationally is increasingly divided between an elite group of public and private schools that prepare their students for college and professional school and lowly group of ragtag inner city and rural or small town public schools (many of which are in the non-union South) that expel their students into the bottom rungs of service economy.
"If you listen to education reformers, you would imagine that there is a huge demand for highly educated workers at the top that the lower tier schools are not meeting, but that is not the case."

John B. Judis at The New Republic questions would-be school reformers.