It is currently in vogue to claim that the public education system is failing us. This is supported by a variety of evidence on incomes, racial disparities in achievement, and so forth. However, such statements by themselves are not very useful since, even if true, they provide the educational decision maker with no information from which to do his job better. It is simply easier to provide a balance sheet of the outputs of education than it is to provide descriptions for action, and this fact accounts for why there has been more analysis of the results of education than of methods of improving education.