60% of Students at Inner City Chicago School Flunk 8th Grade. Now truthfully when you read that headline it hardly raises an eyebrow anymore, does it? We’ve come to expect failure in our government schools.

CBS2 reports:

A startling number of children are falling through the cracks at one Chicago Public School. More than half of the kids didn’t even pass the eighth grade…It was a disastrous year for the eighth grade at the south side Bradwell Elementary school in a tough neighborhood with high poverty. More than half the class, 44 of 77 students, did not graduate.

My Pet Jawa wonders why the city that had Barack Obama and Bill Ayers running the Annenberg Project isn’t doing so well.

But this isn’t just a one school or a one city problem. The problem is government controlling education. According to the Heritage Foundation in combined scores of mathematics and science literacy, 12th-graders in the United States ranked 18th out of 21 countries on the 1995 TIMSS assessment. While, over the past 30 years, average per-pupil expenditures for public, elementary, and secondary schools have nearly doubled, rising from $3,931 in 1971-1972 to $7,524 in 2001-2002, in constant dollars.

So in short, more money means less results in our government controlled education system. And now, this same government that controls education now wants to take over healthcare.

In fact, there’s evidence that the more time children spend in public schools, the more they fall behind other countries. ABC’s John Stossel reports:

At age 10, American students take an international test and score well above the international average. But by age 15, when students from 40 countries are tested, the Americans place 25th.

Studies show that

graduating from high school in the America’s largest cities amounts, essentially, to a coin toss. Only about one-half (52 percent) of students in the principal school systems of the 50 largest cities complete high school with a diploma.

In Cleveland, Indianapolis and Detroit, the numbers are 35%, 31% and 25% respectively.

I think success of our education system must be measured in some way. Whether its test scores or graduation rates they’re failing. Shouldn’t the government be focused on the responsibilities its already taken on rather than taking over the entire health care industry. Do you want the quality of health care in this country to be a coin toss?

HT My Pet Jawa