Free Redneck Nation by Michael Graham

seekers of justice, traveling across the Jim Crow South, have reacted to this outrage?
    Unfortunately, the school I’m describing wasn’t on the route of the Freedom March and it wasn’t under the jurisdiction of
     Governor George Wallace. No, you can find this school system today in Cleveland. And I don’t mean Cleveland, Mississippi.
    In 1998, the very northern Cleveland schools had the worst graduation rate in America for black students. Anunderwhelming 29 percent of black freshmen had graduated by the end of their senior year, according to the Manhattan Institute.
     Do you detect racial bias? Don’t worry—the graduation rate for students of all races was a mere 28 percent. So when it comes
     to black kids, Cleveland is actually overachieving!
    Where is the second worst major school system in America? Milwaukee, which you will note is also slightly north of the Mason-Dixon
     line. Cleveland and Milwaukee, two very northern cities in fairly liberal states, and they, along with Philadelphia and Washington,
     D.C., have some of the worst-performing schools in America.
    Not that Georgia and Alabama are reaching new heights of academic excellence, but remember: They’re in the South. Their schools
     are supposed to suck. As a victim of a hideous southern public school system, I fled North… only to find that the rest of
     America was also worshipping at the great altar of illiteracy.
    When I first began working on this book and noticing these bright lines of demarcation between the cultures of North and South,
     education leaped out at me as the most obvious. Down South, the North has long been synonymous with the word “smart,” though
     it was frequently followed by the word “ass.”
    Northern attitudes about college are so different from ours. We hear, for example, that Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Brown
     are popular and well-regarded institutions of higher learning, despite having never appeared in a BCS bowl game. It’s a difficult
     concept for Southerners to fathom.
    Most southern states don’t have a single top-tier college within their borders. In fact, the southern “Ivy League”consists of Duke, Vanderbilt, and, if you grade on a curve, Georgia Tech. However, we do lead the nation in educational institutions
     dedicated to over-the-road trucking.
    So it’s no surprise that our public schools are lousy. All the rest of our schools are, too. But what’s going on up North?
     I thought you guys were the smart ones.
    If your doctor had a failure rate of 71 percent, he would be desmocked. If a restaurant successfully delivered only a quarter
     of the meals ordered, it would be abandoned. If a police force successfully closed 29 percent of its major crime cases, it
     would be the Washington, D.C., Metro police department.
    But every single day, moms and dads in Cleveland, Milwaukee, and Philly are required
by the government
to send unsuspecting children to institutions where we know, we absolutely know, that a solid majority of them will fail.
     To paraphrase a question I’ve heard most of my life: Hey, Yankee! If you’re so smart, how come your schools suck?
    What’s more confusing is that you Northerners don’t seem to care that your public schools are as bad as ours. If you aren’t
     worried about the kids, don’t you at least resent the waste of tax dollars? What happened to northern efficiency? Forget about
     the poorly educated, overly self-esteemed children (you might as well; the school system sure has); doesn’t it bother you
     that the public schools are such a lousy
business
proposition?
    In Newark, New Jersey, the average public school education costs the taxpayers around $14,000 per child. Yet Newark is near
     the bottom in student achievement. They’re paying for filet mignon and getting last Friday’s meat loaf—and nobody’s complaining?
    The one thing I thought I knew about Northerners is that they won’t put up with lousy service. Except for the weather, Yankees
     don’t put