American education: Running hard, and last
October 23, 2002

As the debate over how to fix America’s schools continues with politicians beholden in one way or another to teachers’ unions suggesting that it is the advocates of vouchers, tax credits and home schooling who are the true enemies of education, some recent statistics from the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) are worthy of note.

Thirty years ago, we Americans were spending far less on education than we do today, but our then mostly public schools were doing a far better job. The OECD says, in fact, that less than three decades ago, this country was the “undisputed” world leader in educating its young people. This is no longer true.

In fact, among the world’s 18 industrialized nations today, we rank last. That’s right — last — in literacy among young people who have graduated from high school, but are not going on to college. Fully 60 percent of our young people, according to the OECD, read at a level that makes it impossible for them to deal with “the complex demands of modern life.”

Anyone who clings to the belief that our schools are getting better, or that those folks looking for alternative ways to educate their kids are weird, should contemplate these numbers. A society that cannot even educate its children will not long survive in today’s world. It is a society that is living on its past accomplishments and, in the process, devouring its human resources.

The answer to this problem will not be found in the federal budget. Politicians believe and, indeed, have perhaps always believed, that throwing more and more money at it can solve almost any problem. The Bush-Kennedy education bill reflected this sort of thinking even if the president wanted to do more than just spend money.

But we have been throwing money at this problem for more than 30 years. I remember back in the mid-1970s when Democrats were saying that the problem was that Republicans are just too stingy, policy analyst Herman Kahn produced a graph demonstrating that as per capita spending was increasing, student test scores were falling. A cynic might have seen a direct connection.

Indeed, it has been estimated that over the last quarter century, taxpayers have pumped some $125 billion into an effort to close the growing gap between young white and minority students. The gap has grown, but now fewer students of any race are learning much of anything.

The truth, however, is more complicated. Sure, kids watch too much television and spend too much time playing video games. Certainly, parents have become less involved with the education of their kids today than they were when I was a kid. All true, but what is a parent to do when the only choice available is a school run by incompetents, staffed by teachers who couldn’t teach on their best day and filled with kids who live in fear of their peers?

In the District of Columbia, which spends more than virtually any jurisdiction in the country on its students, many of the kids who do get sent in by their parents aren’t even being given textbooks — not because the schools can’t afford them, but because, as The Washington Post reported recently, the school administrators didn’t bother to order them on time.

And yet, when reformers suggest that the poor kids who are forced to attend these crime-ridden day care centers might benefit from alternatives, the politicians and teachers’ unions stand up as one to say no. The ought to be proud of themselves because it is they who are doing more than all of this nation’s enemies to undermine its future.

It is perfectly true, of course, that some of our public schools still work fairly well. Many of those of us who graduated from public schools three or four decades ago, assume they are as good as they were then. They aren’t. The schools in the better neighborhoods that draw from homes with college-educated parents do a better job than most inner city schools, but even they don’t do the job they did when we were kids.

We rightly praise the thousands of good, dedicated teachers who toil in poor schools and celebrate the achievements of students who rise to the top and go on to what are still the world’s best colleges. But we have to recognize that there are fewer of each every year.

One has to give President Bush some credit for wanting to do something about the problem. His education bill was deeply flawed, reflecting as it did the views of Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) and others whose votes he decided he needed to pass it, but at least he tried.

He likes to look forward to the day when no child will be left behind. Those are bold words in a nation where 60 percent of our children are today hopelessly behind their counterparts in other nations.

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David Keene is chairman of the American Conservative Union and a Washington-based government affairs consultant