Some months ago, I added Steve Nelson to the honor roll of this blog because everything I read by this remarkable man made so much sense. He is the headmaster of the Calhoun School, a fine New York City private school.

Yet he isn’t looking out for the self-interest of the private schools and their pupils, but for the good of American children and our society.

In this article, Nelson surveys the media moaning over PISA scores and says that the critics have chosen the wrong target.

Our schools are not broken, he writes.

Our society is.

Here is a sample of his thinking, which I share and admire:

We don’t have an education problem in America. We have a social disease. It is as though we are starving our children to death and trying to fix it by investing in more scales so we can weigh them constantly.

Charter schools, Common Core, voucher programs, online education, Teach for America… None of these initiatives, whether financially-motivated opportunism or sincere effort at reform, will make a dent in our educational malaise, because the assumptions are wrong.

As is often the case in our “blame the victim” culture, it is generally believed that improving education will cure poverty. This invites the inference that poor education created poverty. But it is simply not true. Poverty created poor education. The victim blamers cite lazy children and bad parenting as contributors to poverty. But poverty dulls motivation and cripples parents.

And perhaps worst of all, the poor performance of our students is attributed to poor teaching and unions. I propose that today’s teachers (even the underprepared Teach For America kind) are as good or better than teachers were a generation ago. Neither they nor their weakened unions are the cause of our education problems.

It is also asserted that our place in the global economy is threatened by the poor quality of American education. But this is also backwards. Our place in the global economy threatens education, not the other way around. In the service of economic global dominance, we have sacrificed families and schools.

But we persist in our misguided efforts to “fix” education nonetheless. Education reform has been underway for many years, most energetically since No Child Left Behind was enacted in 2001. I challenge any reader to provide comprehensive evidence that education has improved since then.

And I would add, though nothing need be added, that “school reform” has become a Great Distraction, a way of NOT addressing the root causes of low academic performance.

That may explain why so many billionaires and corporations love to invest in “school reform,” because it is so much more cost efficient than doing something about income inequality and wealth inequality, which are worst than at any point in the past century.

But again, Nelson says it better than I could. He writes:

Raise the minimum wage to a real living wage. Provide affordable health care for every family. End the regressive tax system that has eviscerated local communities. Provide disincentives to the multi-national corporations that have abandoned American communities while chasing the cheapest labor overseas. Put Americans to work with bold infrastructure investment. Extend the meager unemployment benefits that keep many families out of abject poverty. Stop pretending that racism is dead. Instead of telling people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, remove the boot heels of oppression.

Let’s do these things for a decade, and then we’ll talk about PISA scores.