At higher levels of education, namely, graduate and professional schools, American education is unmatched anywhere. All over the world, people seeking high-quality advanced degrees want to attend American universities. But at lower levels of education, primary and secondary education and increasingly undergraduate college education, America lags far behind most developed countries. In primary and secondary education, our students rank at or near the bottom. We've seen this decline become progressively worse over the past four decades while politicians and the education establishment manufacture one excuse after another to explain the disaster.
Education received by white Americans is nothing to write home about, but that received by black Americans borders on criminal fraud. We find instances of black youngsters graduating from high school with nearly a 4.0 (A) grade-point average who cannot read and compute at the eighth-grade level or achieve a combined score of 600 (out of a possible 1,600) on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). Although the education establishment can make a case that they cannot be held responsible for environmental factors that negatively affect education, such as hostile student attitudes, poor parental support, broken homes, and neighborhood violence, the grades they give and the diplomas they issue are fully under their control.
The education establishment and politicians have successfully argued that our education problems can be solved by greater expenditures of taxpayer dollars. Despite unprecedented education expenditures, which top those of any other nation in the world, educational outcomes are far worse than they were when we were spending far less money. In fact, several studies demonstrate an inverse relationship between education expenditures and education achievement. Casual observation demonstrates this as well. For example, Washington, D.C., New York, Detroit, and Philadelphia schools are among the worst in the nation in terms of student achievement; however, in terms of per capita student spending, they rank near the top in the nation.
Some black politicians and civil rights organizations blame the poor quality of education received by blacks on racial discrimination. That argument doesn't hold water because the worst educations that black youngsters receive are in cities where the mayor is black, the superintendent of schools is black, the city council is dominated by blacks, and most of the school principals and teachers are black. What's more, these are the very cities where education expenditures rank at or near the top nationally. Moreover, education expenditures are even higher when we take into account school-related services that don't show up in the education budget, such as police and social services.
The columns that follow discuss just how bad education has become; they also include some education success stories and suggestions on how to duplicate those successes, namely, by introducing competition into our education system through school vouchers or tuition tax credits.