run, while I agree with you about how twisted our national priorities are, suzie's comment that throwing more money at education isn't going to improve outcomes sounds compelling to me.

I also question your facts. According to an article in Reason Online, America doubled per pupil spending, adjusting for inflation, over the last 30 years, <link> , yet test scores and graduation rates have stayed flat. New York City now spends $11,000 per student according to the article. What do countries like Belgium, whose students best ours on average, spend per student?

Most learning takes place between a student and a book, doesn't it? What's that cost? Will hiring more school administrators at $200K or more a year help? Will fancier buildings or nicer furniture help? I don't think so.

I also question the pervasive assumption that education prevents crime. You would have turned to carjacking if you hadn't attended school? I don't think so.

Consider the following:

Educational romanticism consists of the belief that just about all children who are not doing well in school have the potential to do much better. Correlatively, educational romantics believe that the academic achievement of children is determined mainly by the opportunities they receive; that innate intellectual limits (if they exist at all) play a minor role; and that the current K-12 schools have huge room for improvement.

No one disputes the empirical predictiveness of tests of intellectual ability—IQ tests—for large groups. If a classroom of first-graders is given a full-scale IQ test that requires no literacy and no mathematics, the correlation of those scores with scores on reading and math tests at age seventeen is going to be high. Such correlations will be equally high whether the class consists of rich children or poor, black or white, male or female. They will be high no matter how hard the teachers have worked. Scores on tests of reading and math track with intellectual ability, no matter what.

To sum up, a massive body of evidence says that reading and mathematics achievement have strong ties to underlying intellectual ability, that we do not know how to change intellectual ability after children reach school, and that the quality of schooling within the normal range of schools does not have much effect on student achievement. To put it another way, we have every reason to think—and already did when the No Child Left Behind Act was passed—that the notion of making all children proficient in math and reading is ridiculous. Such a feat is not possible even for an experimental school with unlimited funding, let alone for public schools operating in the real world. By NAEP’s definition of proficiency, we probably cannot make even half of the students proficient.

[E]ducational romanticism asks too much from students at the bottom of the intellectual pile, asks the wrong things from those in the middle, and asks too little from those at the top. It short-changes all of them.