Twenty-five years ago, Congress passed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act to improve academic performance of students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Refer back to the statistics from the National Assessment of Educational Progress report, where a paltry 12 percent of such disadvantaged black children were found to be proficient in reading. It would appear that the only correlation in all this is the one between the increase in spending, and the inevitable decrease in test scores. The problem here folks isn't money. The problem is one of misguided priorities by people involved.
Many politicians have as their top priority the goal of being re-elected.
Affluent judges have as a priority making themselves feel better about themselves. It doesn't matter if their court orders actually work, so long as they can attend their hoity-toity cocktail parties and pat themselves on the back for being such great and wonderful people. The national teacher's unions have as a priority whatever is in the best interest of their members, whether it coincides with what's in the students' best interest or not. Let me say that again. Another example of this happened a couple of weeks back regarding the Pulaski County Special School District's attempt to convert from the junior high to a middle school concept.