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The Getting Down to Facts project furthermore said there was “essentially no relationship” between how much California spent on its students and a school’s Academic Performance Index, which until now has been the main way schools’ effectiveness in improving academic outcomes has been measured. “If additional dollars were inserted in the current system, there would be no reason to expect substantial increases in student outcomes related to state goals,” Loeb and her colleagues concluded in their 2007 paper.

In 1971, according to the Pew Research Center, 61% of all adults lived in middle-income households. By 2011, the middle-income share had fallen to 51%, while the lower- and upper-income sectors grew. Median household income in 2011 was not significantly higher than it had been in 1989. Because upper-income households fared much better during those four decades, their share of total household income increased by 17 percentage points—to 46% from 29%—while the middle-income share fell by 17 points, to 45% from 62%. No wonder Neiman-Marcus and Wal-Mart WMT +0.24% are doing well while J.C. Penney JCP +3.58% and Sears are nearing collapse.

Although the wealthiest Americans have always lived in their own islands of privilege, sociologists and demographers say the degree to which today’s professional class resides in a world apart is a departure from earlier generations. People of widely different incomes and professions commonly lived close enough that they mingled at stores, sports arenas and school. In an era in which women had fewer educational and professional opportunities, lawyers married secretaries and doctors married nurses. Now, lawyers and doctors marry each other.

A recent analysis of census data by sociologists Sean Reardon of Stanford and Kendra Bischoff of Cornell highlighted how middle-income neighborhoods have been fading away as more people live in areas that are either poor or affluent.

ObamaCare isn't the only thing the Obama administration is spinning these days. In education, too, accomplishments on the ground don't match the rhetoric coming out of Washington. That's the main take-away from the latest results on student performance in math and reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which the Education Department released on Thursday after some delay.

Governor Christie's signature reforms have been in education. It's an issue that has helped the Republican reach out to minorities

These efforts got a boost in October when independent researchers from Stanford University and the University of Virginia looked at a similar teacher tenure and rating system that's been in place for a few years now in Washington DC. The researchers found that the program was doing exactly what it was supposed to do: weed out the worst teachers and force the next lowest performing ones to improve. It's not a perfect system, but it's starting to get the right results.