Let's Throw Good Money After Bad

Yes.  Give us a billion here and a billion there and we could really solve the high-school dropout problem.  That’s about what Education Secretary Spellings is proposing, according to Donald Lambro.

Back in the 1960s President Kennedy pointed out that four in ten youngsters did not finish high school.

"Forty-four years later, the dropout rate for African-American, Hispanic and Native American students approaches 50 percent. We are wasting not just lives but time," Mrs. Spellings said in an address to the National Summit on America’s Silent Epidemic

 Secretary Spellings has a solution.

Mrs. Spellings proposes Title I spending in President Bush’s No Child Left Behind reauthorization be increased another $1 billion "to improve and strengthen our public high schools serving low-income students."

Like that’s going to help.

Look, we know why kids are failing high school and high schools are failing kids.  It is part of the whole welfare state syndrome.

• Why bother to work in school when many low-income women can use the welfare system to get support?
• Why bother to work in school when women are available to you—without having to demonstrate the ability to get a “decent” job?
• Why bother to educate kids when your job is pretty well guaranteed for life?

And so on.  The problem is that we don’t know what kind of schools low-income parents want.  We don’t know what kind of schools would best prepare low-income kids for a productive life.

All we know is what the experts have told us and what the education monopoly has bullied us into funding.

Imagine that the auto industry had been run by university professors and union leaders for the last 160 years. 

That’s the point.  What schools need is what everyone needs: open competition for the votes of the consumers.