Those Who Can't Do, Teach

America is known as a dismal failure when it comes to public education. The Left, made up of teacher-backed politicians, teachers' unions, and the supposedly more-generous-than-you liberals, would have you believe this is caused by a lack of funding.

Translation: let us blindly throw more money at a situation that the entire United States Treasury could not solve. In a recent article, Walter E. Williams, a syndicated columnist for the Orange County Register, seems to expose the explanation for our embarrassing American school system.

In 2004, the U.S. spent about $9,938 per secondary-school student. More money might explain why Swiss and Norwegian students do better than ours because they, respectively, spent $12,176 and $11,109 per student. But what about Finland ($7,441) and South Korea ($6,761), which scored first and second in math literacy?

He continues by saying the Slovak Republic ($2,744) and Hungary ($3,692) both have higher math and science literacy than America's, along with numerous other nations. So, money isn't the problem - but what is?

The problem is the overall quality of people teaching our children. Students who have chosen education as their major have the lowest SAT scores of any major. Students who have graduated with an education degree earn lower scores than any other major on graduate school admission tests. Schools of education, either graduate or under-graduate, represent the academic slums of most any university.

I must agree that Barack Obama's recently proposed "$18 billion increase in federal education" is simply "the typical [liberal] knee-jerk response."

Perhaps, as a nation, we must seriously consider vouchers - and the possible elimination of Schools of Education altogether.