An interesting little read from Cato @ Liberty:
Senator Obama launched a major education counter-offensive today, in a speech laying out his vision for the future of American schooling. Calling for a renewal of the public school system to “meet the challenges of a new time,” Obama held up the National Defense Education Act of 1958 as a model for what he has in mind. He told the Dayton, Ohio crowd that “Eisenhower doubled federal investment in education after the Soviets beat us to space. That’s the kind of leadership we must show today.”The trouble is, the NDEA was an expensive failure. Congress’ goal was to improve achievement in math and science following the Soviet Union’s launch of the Satellite Sputnik. There are no nationally representative science results from the time, but high school mathematics performance actually fell in the eight years following passage of the law, according to national norm studies conducted by the College Board, which administers the SAT and PSAT (see figure below). By 1983, math scores had still not returned to the level they had been at before the NDEA was passed.
