Back in February, while campaigning for the Democratic nomination, Senator Obama was asked his views on private school choice. He responded, “if there was any argument for vouchers it was ‘Let’s see if the experiment works.’ And if it does, whatever my preconception, you do what’s best for kids.” Within days, the Obama campaign was backing away from his comment, and touting his long criticism of private school choice. In the months that followed he has criticized Senator McCain for offering “the same tired rhetoric about vouchers.”

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Having apparently lost his open mind on the issue, Senator Obama has fallen back on the traditional political platform that equates higher spending with leadership and progress. In a major education speech in Dayton, Ohio, Obama opened with a grim assessment of the status quo: our high school students have some of the lowest math and science scores, and among the highest dropout rates, in the industrialized world. His solution? “Eisenhower doubled federal investment in education after the Soviets beat us to space. That’s the kind of leadership we must show today.” Obama is still more specific on this subject in his fact sheet on “21st century threats”:

When Sputnik was launched in 1957, President Eisenhower used the event as a call to arms for Americans to help secure our country and to increase the number of students studying math and science via the National Defense Education Act. That educational base not only improved our national security and space programs but also led to our economic growth and innovation over the second half of the century. Barack Obama will lead the nation by investing again in math and science education that is vital to protecting our national security and our competitiveness.

The trouble is, the National Defense Education Act was an expensive failure. Nationally, representative science scores from the time are hard to come by, but the mathematics performance of 11th graders fell in the eight years following passage of the law, according to “national norm” studies conducted by the College Board. Scores had still not returned to pre-NDEA levels a decade after that.

This decline was not the result of changes in the percentage of students taking the test, and things did not improve in the ensuing decades. The mathematics performance of 17-year-olds has been stagnant since the early 1970s, while science scores have actually fallen slightly over the same period. That’s according to the Long Term Trends portion of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which began around 1970.