It matters in thinking about solutions. And, of course, in the ever-popular hobby of assigning blame. The title I see is "Schools Are Failing to Teach Kids How to Read". If rayiner is correct, then the actual title should be, "Schools Doing Fine, But Their Job Is Getting Harder".
This is key: my wife is a teacher and hates these stories because the headline should be more like “Schools doing fine, fewer students are falling through the cracks”. It’s especially important when you see people obsessing about school test scores and paying huge premiums to live a neighborhood without poor people when the public data clearly shows that anyone from a stable household performs the same as at the school which has more rich kids.
And when people are scared to live in the “bad” school districts you get concentrated poverty, which makes life even harder for poor families than if they were in neighborhoods with more economic diversity.
