1118 Where are they now?

Over at LISNews, Brian says he is shocked "by the decrease in education and funding to support school libraries." Not me. I'm shocked that conservatives continue to support the administration's thowing money at education when there is no evidence that this is the problem! Bush has spent far more on education than Clinton did. Even the NCLB was essentially demanding that schools live up to the standards and goals they had set instead of ignoring the poorest and the weakest.

Last week Milton Friedman in the WSJ pondered the dropping SATs since 1970. He mentioned several dates, but didn't seem to connect a lot of dots: 1965 NEA converted from a professional association to a trade union; 1983 "A Nation at Risk" was published spawning even more government attempts to fix education; defeating voucher system in California in 1993 and 2000. Friedman never mentions the changes in the lives of women during this period.

Let's go back to the early 1970s. Abortion becomes legal and the feminist movement really builds up steam. Possibly the brightest and best were aborted--I mean over 30 million Americans who were the spawn of young college bound and career women just disappeared. (Poor and minority women didn't really get on that bandwagon right away. They still believed that children were their future, not a glass ceiling job.) We'll never know what their contributions could have been or how they might have influenced the scores and results of school testing. Then when their putative mothers did have families, many of those later-in-life children were put in the care of less capable women during their important formative years.

I don't think there's enough federal money in Washington to fix the mess of the last 30 years, much of it created by women.

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