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A Crisis Exploded

For the Rockefellers, the timing couldn’t have been worse. I have before me their report on education, issued last Monday, which explains once over again, and even more shrilly than is customary, the trouble with U.S. education: not nearly enough money. And alongside it, the hottest thing on the subject in years— a volume called School Needs in the Decade Ahead, which made its appearance six days following the Rockefeller effort and thereupon rendered it and just about everything else in the field obsolete. The book reflects an exhaustive study of public school finances conducted by the Institute of Social Science Research, and comes out now under the byline of Mr. Roger Freeman, former research director for the Education Committee of the Eisenhower Commission on Intergovernmental Relations and consultant on school finance to the White House Conference on Education. I don’t say that the ISSR study is unanswerable, but I do say that prevailing dogma in the field cannot go on being taught until it is answered. The charts, tables and statistics in the book cogently challenge nearly all the major assumptions that govern current discussion of public education, and shift the burden of proof squarely to the other side. Some random examples:

LB

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L. Brent Bozell Jr.

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A Crisis Exploded

For the Rockefellers, the timing couldn’t have been worse. I have before me their report on education, issued last Monday, which explains once over again, and even more shrilly than is customary, the trouble with U.S. education: not nearly enough money. And alongside it, the hottest thing on the subject in years— a volume called School Needs in the Decade Ahead, which made its appearance six days following the Rockefeller effort and thereupon rendered it and just about everything else in the field obsolete. The book reflects an exhaustive study of public school finances conducted by the Institute of Social Science Research, and comes out now under the byline of Mr. Roger Freeman, former research director for the Education Committee of the Eisenhower Commission on Intergovernmental Relations and consultant on school finance to the White House Conference on Education. I don’t say that the ISSR study is unanswerable, but I do say that prevailing dogma in the field cannot go on being taught until it is answered. The charts, tables and statistics in the book cogently challenge nearly all the major assumptions that govern current discussion of public education, and shift the burden of proof squarely to the other side. Some random examples: