Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed

by Jason L. Riley

A 2012 Schott Foundation for Public Education report noted that the black-white disparity in high-school graduation rates among males had narrowed by just three percentage points in the previous decade. “At this rate of progress,” said the report, “. . . it would take another 50 years to close the graduation gap between Black males and their White male counterparts.”8 These results are occurring despite the fact that the growth of the education workforce has far outpaced student enrollment. “Since 1970, the public school workforce has roughly doubled—to 6.4 million from 3.3 million—and two-thirds of those new hires are teachers or teachers’ aides,” wrote Andrew Coulson of the Cato Institute in 2012. “Over the same period, enrollment rose by a tepid 8.5%. Employment has thus grown 11 times faster than enrollment.”9 Harvard professor Paul Peterson noted that since the 1960s, per-pupil spending in the United States has more than tripled after adjusting for inflation, while the number of pupils per teacher has fallen by a third.10