Jim Baker and Mike Deaver prevailed, arguing that while Meese was right, there was too much good stuff in the booklet to campaign on to let it die. In 1980, inspired by Friedman's writing, Chile initiated a national system of vouchers. Chile also tests kids in grades four and eight and gathers background info on families. It didn't work. What did work was a government program that provided more money and teacher training to the nation's 900 lowest performing schools.
Dour accounts abound.
Typical is the commentary of Stephan Thernstrom, Winthrop Professor of History at Harvard University and co-author with his wife Abigail of America in Black and White. We spend more and more money on education each year, but what we have to show for the investment is very much open to question. For more than a quarter century now, the National Assessment of Educational Progress has been monitoring the achievement of representative samples of American students at the ages of nine, thirteen, and seventeen. The results are disheartening. At the end of their high school education, our students today are not significantly better at reading writing or math than they were a generation ago, and their command of science is discernibly weaker.