<i>Schools and parents need to stop blaming each other, and work together to show children that we value learning.</i><p>Yeah, good luck with that. Private institutions, especially colleges and universities, are exactly where they want to be right now. Parents have an extremely inelastic demand for sending their children to good private schools because signaling is so important in this terrible job market - this allows universities to raise tuition with impunity. Combine this with an ever-increasing pool of candidates for roughly the same number of spots at ivy-leagues and other comparable institutions, and colleges are set to make a killing on tuition.<p>Why would private schools have any incentive to change a system that benefits them to such a degree?