Who wants to be depressed? This weekend, the Inquirer posted the test scores of Philly schools. Recognizing the problems with school testing, I nevertheless went through, and pulled out the scores of some notable Philly high schools. Students were put into three categories: Advanced, Proficient and Basic/Below basic.

What is clear, and obvious enough to people who have been here a while, is that we have a tale of two school districts: The magnet schools like Central and Masterman, and everybody else. Check out the numbers below:

As expected, the magnet schools do just fine. While a school like Central might have some problems, kids who go there come out prepared to go to college.

But, the large majority of our kids don't go to magnets, and are in neighborhood schools that are dramatically bad. There is obviously a lot of room for debating how much of this is the schools themselves, and how much of this is our general destructive society. But, entire schools with zero kids testing as advanced? Schools with 90 percent of kids at basic or below basic levels? The word that most comes to mind for me is... shameful.

We are producing thousands of young men and women who have little reading or writing skills, little to no chance to go to college, and little prospect of making a decent wage.

Fixing our schools will cost a lot of money- about a billion dollars apparently. But the price we will pay as a society for inaction, and a continuation of these obvious failings, is immeasurable.