In 2001 G W Bush and Ted Kennedy teamed up to fix public education by giving us “No Child Left Behind,” which was supposed to fix a system supposedly already fixed by a 1994 piece of federal legislation called “Goals 2000,” which was supposed to fix a system already fixed by “America 2000,” which was a 1991 response during the Bush administration to a 1983 federal report on education called “A Nation at Risk, which was published a full four years after Jimmy Carter fixed the nation’s public school system by first establishing a cabinet-level Department of Education in 1979.
You don’t have to be Nostradamus to see what the future holds if this trend is allowed to continue – more money thrown at ever larger failures, year after year after year. Has there ever been a year in which the federal government has spent less money on education than the year before? Of course not. Has there ever been a year in which America has been able to declare that it has the best educated population in the world? Not that I’ve ever heard.
One nice thing about the free market is that when a business continuously delivers shoddy products to its customers at inflated prices, the customers eventually stop buying and the business is forced to stop wasting resources and shut its doors. Not so with federal programs. If a federal program – such as public education — fails miserably at its stated purpose, then all the special interests and social engineering bureaucrats start screaming that the failure is due to a lack of funding.
Thus, the worse the performance, the more money these people get. Talk about a perverse incentive. Naturally, those who would argue that maybe it is time to stop throwing good money after bad, and that maybe it is time to get the federal government out of the education business altogether, will be greeted with horrified accusations they don’t care about the education of “our nation’s children.”.
1995: David C. Berliner and Bruce J. Biddle publish "The Manufactured Crisis," which questions the data used in "A Nation at Risk" and says legislators used bad information to enact bad reforms. The still-influential book said the 1983 report characterized the quality of public education as far worse than it was. Other critics say the report focused too heavily on high schools.
We still believe the overall quality is terrible, although some analysts say it's mainly terrible in inner cities...