Sec. Duncan's Own Private India

by Clay Burell · 2009-05-24 08:18:00 UTC
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"Our children are competing for jobs against children in India and China today, and those children are going to school 25, 30 percent more than us," Duncan said at Brookings this past week.
--"Education fact check: Are U.S. students really that bad?" Libby Quaid, (AP)

Maybe Sec. Duncan is talking about a different India. In the best-known one, many children, particularly rural ones, don't seem to go to school at all:
.

(For what it's worth, I lived in Shanghai for five years, and traveled most of China, and I can tell you by personal experience, including many school visits, that most of their schools outside the major cities - and many within them - are decades behind ours in terms of class size, pedagogy, technology, resources, and more. And their education, like India's, is far from universal. Maybe Mr. Duncan is talking about a different China, too.)

It makes a good scare-story, though.

Clay Burell
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