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Children before special interests (Matthew Ladner)

Oprah Winfrey recently used two days of her program to highlight the crisis in American public schools, focusing attention on our appalling dropout problem. The visuals were quite stunning.

In one segment, a group of inner-city Chicago students traded places with a group of suburban students to compare facilities and curriculums. In another, a valedictorian from a rural high school told of needing remedial classes in college. Perhaps most striking of all, CNN’s Andersen Cooper toured a high school near the White House that was in a shameful state of disrepair. Pieces of the ceiling had fallen on the ground, holes in the roof let rain pour into the school, restrooms were inoperable and unlit.

Oprah deserves a good deal of credit for putting a spotlight on these problems. Public schools face a dropout problem of stunning scale. Estimates from the Manhattan Institute put the nation’s dropout rate near 30 percent, with rates much higher among low-income and minority students. Many who do graduate do so without mastering high-school level material, as evidenced not only by the need for remediation among college students, but also in the stunningly poor literacy skills of the public.

National reading tests show that 38 percent of our fourth-graders score "below basic" in reading, meaning that they have failed to gain the basic literacy skills necessary to function academically. These students will drift into middle school, and literally be unable to make heads or tails of their textbooks.

They don’t ever see themselves going to college, and see little point in attending high school, and begin to drop out of school in large numbers in late middle school. Our students and taxpayers deserve and need much better.

While the Winfrey programs emphasized the disparities between facilities in urban and suburban schools, a more disturbing gap lies in the area of teacher quality. There is a limited supply of highly skilled teachers, and the public school system does not recognize their performance with higher compensation.

Teacher pay is typically determined largely by a pay scale that rigidly rewards length of service and credentialism, but not effectiveness. Lacking control over pay, these teachers gravitate toward better working conditions like the suburban school complexes featured on the program.

Research shows that a child sitting through three ineffective teachers in a row learns 50 percent less in their subject matter, but the students who need the more effective teachers the most are also the least likely to get one.

How did we get here? It’s not from a lack of resources. The school Andersen Cooper visited, for example, is a part of a district that spends more than $16,000 a pupil per year.

That’s more than enough to pay the tuition for two students to attend the University of Texas at Austin, perhaps to study zoology, engineering or do science experiments with a particle accelerator. Yet the principal of the school displayed unmet maintenance orders going back to 2002.

But U.S. schools can get much better once we put the interests of students and parents before those of the special interests.

The vast majority of people who founded the United States were subsistence farmers and had an average life expectancy of 35 years. They could scarcely have imagined the modern United States, with vast wealth and technological wonders, in which the average life-span is 77 years (and rising) and in which the biggest nutrition concern, even among the poor, is obesity.

The founding generation had little, but their belief in liberty and the pursuit of happiness has transformed the world.

The keys to transforming our schools are functionally simple, but politically difficult: Increase transparency for schools, increase parental choice in both schools and teachers and transform teaching into a true profession that rewards excellence and does not tolerate failure.

Our education system has become tragically divorced from the engine of progress that drives the rest of our economy at the behest of a narrow set of self-interested parties who guard a failed status quo.

But Americans, for all of our differences, universally share a commitment to equality of opportunity, and will not continue to tolerate a school system that looks as though it was designed to serve only the privileged.

Matthew Ladner is a director of state projects at the Alliance for School Choice in Phoenix.  This column was published in the Philadelphia Daily News on Friday, April 21.