There is a lot to unpack here. I’d first reiterate my first assessments, I think that they mostly hold true. Furthermore the guy does some weird stuff, when he mentions there is no good schools only good students, it is quite strange, if you look at research projects and other kinds of outputs such as patents and other kinds of production, I think that there is something to be said about good schools. If you only look at standardized scores, could be that the scores measure things that don’t show the whole picture.

When he talks about separating the smart kids from the not so smart kids, I get confused, because how the hell he has any idea of the percentage of the smarter kids, at the same time that there is no way of separating them? And to that point if the problem is that there is not enough staff or enough rooms to teach separated classes(assuming that that would be preferable) then the point that spending more in schools is only true if you say that this is not one way of spending the money in the schools.

Again about what he says about spending more money wouldn’t fix much, that is quite debatable, it depends a lot of what do you want out of the education system, and quite importantly where the money goes what is done with it.

Another point that I think he misses, is that he does not show evidences from other countries that spending more in education does not work, and it might as well do, and investigate why it works elsewhere and not the US(which I suspect to be true).

I do agree that external factors are expressively responsible for the difference in performance of the students. And I would urge him to delve deep into that, and probably the state should invest in what can be done to handle those things, and I believe that quite a lot of them are related with parents having time to spend with their kids in formative years, and that is quite a discussion about workers rights, wages and working hours, and maybe that would have a lot of impact over education, and that is one point I can stay behind.

Overall my take of the guy is that he for one reason or another is against government spending more money on schools and kinda believes that some people are inherently better than other people, which I think are quite concerning points, because through all the faults education is a pillar of any nation, and a better education must be a priority and investing in an education system is a good thing, having a superior education that comes with debt shackles for the rest of one’s life is not, and so forth, I think that a lot of the issues he points are endemic to the USA, and probably would benefit from a thorough reform of the whole system top to bottom.