I think these issues are relevant here, controversial as they may be. One of the article's central elements is the widespread nature of teachers who do not have a firm grasp of the very subject matter they teach, even at an elementary school level. That's a very serious and fundamental failing of the public school system and relevant to the discussion at hand even if the underlying reasons for that failing were not brought up in the original article.<p>Indeed, I think moving the discussion one or two levels deeper is worthwhile. As in software development, there is almost always a tendency to discuss defects at a superficial level, often resulting in superficial fixes which mask symptoms instead of fix the underlying root causes. In this case the urge to paper over cracks in an increasingly fundamentally broken system is a mistake, better to find out what's at the root and fix the problems there.