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The following is an article by a good friend of mine, James Ingrassia. It was published in Delaware Online. James is passionate about education and has created a "Schooling Delaware" Substack that you can subscribe to for free at https://schoolingdelaware.com/. I know you will find this article enlightening.

What Thomas Sowell Can Teach Delaware About Its Schools

Delaware keeps spending more on education. Too many students are still being failed. That is not just a policy failure. It is a moral one.

Look at the numbers without flinching. Over the past two decades, teacher salaries rose about 11 percent. Spending on support services, mostly administration, rose 49 percent. Since 2000, the number of students and classroom teachers has grown only modestly. The ranks of principals, assistant principals, and administrative staff have swollen far faster. We have built an entrenched adult jobs program. We have not built a better system for children.

This keeps happening because we judge policies by how virtuous they sound instead of what they actually produce. The economist Thomas Sowell spent a lifetime exposing this exact habit. His most piercing observation still applies: “The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.”

When leaders ignore scarcity, they fall into what Sowell called the vision of the anointed, an idealized fantasy of progress built on moral certainty and intellectual superiority. Evidence that contradicts the vision is dismissed. Failures are met with demands for more money, more staff, and more power. The adults in the system are protected. The children are not.

We see the same pattern when standards are lowered in the name of equity. Good intentions do not make weaker expectations any less harmful. A child who cannot read proficiently is not helped by adults congratulating themselves on their compassion. The child is still unprepared. Pretending otherwise is not kindness. It is abandonment dressed up as virtue.

Simply removing barriers is not the solution. The real work is equipping children with the tutoring, mentorship, and rigorous instruction they need to overcome those barriers. Lowering the bar does not lift anyone. Developing strength does.

A recent book by Germinal G. Van, *Thomas Sowell: A Misunderstood Economist*, lays out these ideas with unusual clarity. Van shows how relentlessly Sowell followed the data even when it offended the preferred narrative. That willingness to face reality is precisely what Delaware education policy has too often refused to do.

Real improvement requires something harder than new slogans or larger bureaucracies. It requires measuring what actually works: early literacy, regular attendance, effective teaching in the classroom, and policies that strengthen families instead of trying to replace them. Expanding the administrative class while student results stagnate is not reform. It is self-deception.

Sowell’s insistence on results over rhetoric has shaped how I see schooling in our state. It is also why I launched a petition asking the President to award him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. His ideas remain urgently needed. The petition is at Change.org/AwardSowell.

Delaware does not need another round of well-intentioned expansions that protect the system while leaving the same children behind. It needs the courage to stop measuring success by intentions and start measuring it by results. Until that shift happens, the gap between what we spend and what students receive will keep widening, and the people who pay the highest price will continue to be the ones with the least power to demand better.

For the director of music. According to gittith. [1] A psalm of David.

1 O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens.

2 From the lips of children and infants you have ordained praise because of your enemies, to silence the foe and the avenger.

3 When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,

4 what is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him?

5 You made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor.

6 You made him ruler over the works of your hands; you put everything under his feet:

7 all flocks and herds, and the beasts of the field,

8 the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea, all that swim the paths of the seas.

9 O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!