50 years of squandered chances

The only flaw in Louis Armstrong’s Wonderful World is the line “I see babies crying/I watch them grow/they’ll learn much more/than I’ll ever know.” Education, it turned out, did not progress like science, transport, medicine and pretty much everything else has since the song was written. And today we are told that literacy standards here have barely improved since the 1950s. Has progress ever known a greater enemy than state control?

Lord Adonis is trying his best to downplay the study, but anyone who has read his book (co-written with our very own Stephen Pollard) can guess at his real thoughts. As they said then:

“It is a sad irony that in destroying the direct-grant schools on the altar of equal opportunity, the 1974-9 Labour government succeeded only in denying opportunity to many poor children and increasing the number of fee-paying parents”