Education is the sacred debt that each generation owes to the next. . . .
It is a debt that we are failing to repay. From the Foreword to the American Legislative Exchange Council's 1996 Report Card on American Education. The absence of any statistically significant correlation between student achievement and such factors as spending, salaries, and staffing strongly suggests that the public school system is not making effective use of the substantial financial and staff resources channeled into it. The country's 1980 graduation rate of 72.1 percent fell to 68.8 percent by 1996. While results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress show that American students improved their math skills from 1992 to 1996, the low level of overall math skills still gives cause for alarm.