teacher flight from the challenges in such schools — violence and disorder, truancy, lower school readiness and English-language proficiency, less su… - Robert D. Putnam

Faith communities in which people worship together are arguably the single most important repository of social capital in America. “The church is people,” says Reverend Craig McMullen, the activist co-pastor of the Dorchester Temple Baptist Church in Boston. “It’s not a building; it’s not an institution, even. It is relationships between one person and the next.”6 As a rough rule of thumb, our evidence shows, nearly half of all associational memberships in America are church related, half of all personal philanthropy is religious in character, and half of all volunteering occurs in a religious context. So how involved we are in religion today matters a lot for America’s social capital.

today is a place of stark class divisions, where (according to school officials) wealthy kids park BMW convertibles in the high school lot next to decrepit junkers that homeless classmates drive away each night to live in.

The U.S. educational system cannot be the sole cause of the waning educational stature of the U.S.