What I Have Seen -- Wisdom from a higher-ed career

The lament about our failed schools and universities is by now familiar. From the left, the complaint is that they are underfunded, even ignored by a shortsighted and heartless public. The pay of teachers and professors supposedly remains poor in comparison with similarly educated private-sector professionals. Schools are asked to educate troubled youth and thereby rectify societal ills, all the while seeking a broad equality of result among departing graduates; universities must also accept students who in the past were simply not college material.

Conservatives answer that the schools and universities have adopted a therapeutic curriculum in pursuit of political objectives. Teachers and professors — through powerful unions, archaic tenure protocols, and easy legal redress — are largely unaccountable, and the incompetent among them are immune from removal. While the cost of administration has grown, the quality of education — as measured by either test scores or the ability of students to meet traditional course requirements — has declined over the last four decades. The problem is not too little money, but rather how much money is misspent.

Victor Davis Hanson