Overreaching and Underthinking

By Frederick C. Thayer

Recent reports, Commentaries, and debates appearing in these pages display helter-skelter and overreaching efforts to find quick fixes for educational problems, while also demonstrating an unwillingness to question simplistic myths of all sorts. A few examples can set the stage:

Employers cannot be faulted for trying to choose the best, but society as a whole, acting through its government, can be faulted for requiring that large numbers of young people be kept out of work, a situation that has now endured for two decades. The unemployment rate for white males in the 16- to 19-year-old age group is 18 percent; for females, the rate is 15 percent. Forty percent of young black males are jobless, 38 percent of young black females. The figures remain high through age 24, the period when young people should be establishing themselves as total participants in society.

The bipartisan public policy that causes this disaster proclaims that an overall unemployment rate of at least 6 percent is needed to control inflation by depressing wages, a policy with two measurable effects. Any policy to keep people out of work inevitably affects the young more than other groups, as already indicated. As a policy to depress wages, it also guarantees that those who do find jobs will find themselves living in poverty. The minimum wage has drastically declined in purchasing power for years, and there are no serious efforts to raise it. Half of all full-time minimum-wage workers are adults. The percentage of full-time workers earning "low pay" (too little to support a small family) has jumped from 12 percent to...