I subbed today in a school where 83% of students passed the state’s new annual test, the PARCC test, compared to 33% of students in the state of Illinois overall. Only 2% of the students in this school fall into the low-income category. The rooms are large, walls covered with student work and cheery, inspirational posters. Happy, helpful teachers guided me through hallways. I passed out videotaping permission slips for a teacher trying for her national certification. To those who keep reading about America’s educational meltdown, I assure you nothing even glowed hot in the district where I helped out today.

We don’t read about these districts in the news. The fact that a librarian searching for the answer “Aesop” as an ancient Greek storyteller was given the wrong answer “Homer” by a third- or fourth-grade student goes unnoticed by the outside world. I noticed, though. Who taught that kid about Homer? I spent a day surrounded by impressive little eight- and nine-year-olds who knew more — sometimes much more — than seventh graders who had been passed on to me in another district about 13 miles away.

So many factors affect educational results that I tend to duck topics related to discrepancies in scores between districts. But that district where 83% passed the new state test compared to 33% overall — a 50% difference — has an extraordinarily low poverty rate. In that district 13 miles away where I once taught seventh grade, the poverty rate in the elementary school runs 90% — and only 12% of that school passed the PARCC test.

Still, I’m going to duck the issue of poverty and test results for the moment. I will simply observe that students in American schools continue to compete and beat other students from the best schools around the world — those American students lucky enough to live in the right zip codes, anyway.