EDITORIAL

A new study claims that only 78 percent of whites, 55 percent of blacks and 52 percent of Hispanics manage to make their way through secondary education in America.

Way back in the day, when schools produced educated youngsters, dropouts were few and far between. A recent article by Thomas L. Friedman in The New York Times looked at "The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in America's Schools,"a study by the consulting firm McKinsey.

Friedman writes: "In the 1950s and 1960s, the U.S. dominated the world in K-12 education. We also dominated economically. In the 1970s and 1980s, we still had a lead, albeit smaller, in educating our population through secondary school, and America continued to lead the world economically, albeit with other big economies, like China, closing in. Today, we have fallen behind in both per capita high school graduates and their quality. Consequences to follow."

It was noted that in the 2006 Program for International Student Assessment, which measured the applied learning and problem-solving skills of 15-year-olds in 30 industrialized countries, the U.S. ranked 25th in math and 24th in science.

Those rankings put this country's average youth on a level with their counterparts from Portugal and the Slovak Republic, "rather than with students in countries that are more relevant competitors for service-sector and high-value jobs, like Canada, the Netherlands, Korea and Australia," according to the consulting firm responsible for the study.

Therein lies the problem. Today's youth must compete for service-sector and high-value jobs. The dropouts are left holding the bag.

In the past, America was able to absorb the dropouts with decent paying jobs in factories and other manufacturing enterprises. But we gave all that away—as part of what was purported to be an effort to make underdeveloped countries more middle-class.

We certainly succeeded in that effort and now places like China and India are filling the factories with their less educated residents, leaving the field open for those who can achieve higher educational goals.

How dopey are we? Obviously, very dopey.

The first sign of the achievement gap separating black, Latino and white students should have set off warning bells. But all it did was convince leaders in black communities that the differential was because of racial inequality in the New York City school system.

The answer to that problem was busing to achieve racial equality and more time was spent going to and from school than actually learning.

Children would have been better served if their parents had campaigned for better schools in their own neighborhoods, rather than seeking them long distances away.

Too many of today's U.S. students seem unprepared and unlikely to take their place in the future workforce—and shame on America for having allowed this to happen.