While the flat trend lines for overall achievement at the end of high school mask slight upticks for minority students (black students' scores, for instance, rose by 3-5 percent of the 500 point NAEP score scale), even those modest gains aren't attributable to federal spending. Almost that entire gain happened between 1980 and 1988, when federal spending per pupil declined.
And, in the twenty years since, the scores of African American students have drifted downward while federal spending has risen stratospherically.
I noticed recently that when talks arise about making cuts to education people cringe at the idea of cutting federal money going to help our children. Many have forgotten that there was the time when the Department of Education did not exist. Before the government convinced us that it was entirely their duty, their moral responsibility to educate are children by throwing endless sums of money at a problem which seems to get worse with each passing year. Many in my generation, kids who have grown up with an uncanny sense of entitlement not rivaled by any previous generation, question how it's possible that we managed to educate our children before 1979 the year Jimmy Carter first signed the Department of Education Organization Act into law. This is similar to the question of how anyone survived being poor before the government started its "war on poverty" or how anyone afforded a house before the government started its "affordable housing act." These questions seriously scare me because they signal that the truth about government spending is not reaching the kids in my generation. They hear only that the government is spending; not what, if anything, those expenditures have accomplished. If a kid in my class hears that the president's budget is 3.7 trillion it makes no difference to him because he has nothing with which to compare it to. I am optimistic about the future and hope that truth with shine through these liberal lies and gimmicks. My only hope is that my friends don't wake up one morning and realize that what they have is not what they bargained for.
~Danny~
