Today, a bit more on recent research into this divided nation, especially as regards educational opportunity and inequality.

In 1983 a famous report called the United States “A Nation at Risk” due to poor educational performance that was leaving many students ill-prepared for success in the future and portended a rising tide of mediocrity.

Now, several studies suggest our inability to compete head to head in an ever more demanding global workplace may result in our lagging behind our competitors. In the first, (“For Each and Every Child,” commissioned by the Department of Education) the authors conclude that the tide warned of thirty years ago “has come in – and we’re downing.”

It notes that since the original report there have been five self-described “education presidents,” as well as loudly trumpeted efforts at the state level and yet we have failed to keep pace with leaps forward in educational proficiency abroad.

Much of the problem is of the rich-get-richer sort. Within many states and individual school districts it is normal to find some students have two or even three times as much spent on their education as is spent on other students. We are talking about public schools here, not comparing posh private schools with poor public schools. Unsurprisingly this kind of unequal allocation of resources leads to unequal results.

In many of our competitor nations, education is a national priority with agreed upon standards that all must meet. Here, 16,500 school districts dependent on 50 legislatures are subject to “local political shifts and economic volatility.” As the deep recession we are just emerging from showed, hard hit states cut education funding, fired teachers, gutted programs. This obviously leads to wild variations in educational standards and outcomes. It makes a student’s future prospects subject to the luck of his school’s zip code.

Abroad, the best schools systems recruit almost all their teachers from the top third of college graduates. In America, it is the reverse. Only 30% of teachers come from the top of their graduating classes. Other disparities by economic class are glaring. Sixty-five percent of four-year-olds from poor households attend preschool as opposed to 90% from affluent households.

A second report sheds further light on this division by class and the unequal education offered to poor students and minorities. It was conducted by the Civil Rights Office of the Department of Education and surveyed all 97,000 public schools in America.

It found that 40% of school districts offer no preschool. In those districts that do, it is available to all students in only half. In the crucial areas of science and math, necessary for those hoping to succeed in today’s workplace, the survey found huge disparities by race. An impressive 81 percent of Asian American students and 71 percent of white students attended high schools offering a full range of science and math courses including physics and chemistry, advanced algebra and calculus. For Latino and black children the results were 67 percent and 57 percent respectively.

Our average students lag far behind international competitors as one report after another has shown. In December as reported by NPR, U.S. fifteen-year-old tested 30th among nations in math, 23rd and science and 20th in reading. The top overall scorers were Shanghai, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, Macao, Japan, Lichtenstein, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Estonia. The US was further back, behind Russia and the Slovak Republic. Even students in a top performing state like Massachusetts were found to score two years behind students from Shanghai.

Needless to say, the best students in America can compete with the best in the world, but far too many have the deck stacked against them due to circumstances beyond their control, including their race, the relative prosperity of the school district and state in which they find themselves and their lack of commitment to quality education for all.

They are shortchanged while students of well-off parents in prosperous districts get access to more demanding schools with better educated and compensated teachers, more rigorous curriculum, more resources generally. And for the wealthy, if those schools perform inadequately, there is always the availability of tutors, private schools and whatever it takes to advance the prospects of their offspring.

In our agrarian past an educated elite and a mass of men who performed manual toil may have been acceptable, but as long ago as the 1950s Sputnik beeped a wakeup call. It became clear that we might be outwitted technologically by highly educated competitors. For a moment it was deemed essentially that Americans receive a competitive education. But we did not put our best efforts behind it then or in the 1980s when we were deemed a nation at risk of mediocrity.

We seem to be no more willing to do what it takes now. We keep trying to excel on the cheap, to put up with ill-paid teachers while buying gold-plated buildings, athletic facilities and layers of administration, to accept dumbed down curricula for fear of offending know nothings. We have been willing to provide top flight education for the few while neglecting the many, but that way disaster lies and the clock is running out.

I anticipate the objection that it isn’t all about money. I agree, but quality doesn’t come cheap. I also agree that we spend a lot on education already for poor results. But we spend a lot on defense too and a lot of it is misspent and wasted. Yet no one suggests we disarm or outsource defense. Yet that is often the attitude toward education. Isn’t an educated country almost as vital to our long-term survival as an army and navy?

Over a century ago Ellie Dunn in Shaw’s Heartbreak House, a poor girl seeking a rich husband as the route to a richer life, complained of how hungry her soul was. Captain Shotover was bemused and asked how much her soul could eat. “Oh, a lot,” Said Ellie. “ It eats music and pictures and books…In this country you can’t have them without lots of money. That’s why our souls are so horribly starved.”

That’s a poetic way of stating a hard contemporary truth. Our economy needs lots of educated workers and to manufacture them requires a lot of money for tech savvy teachers and computers for a start. If we aren’t willing to pony up the price, we’re all going to be horribly starved.