It appears to be exceedingly difficult to receive a good education these days — from elementary school through college. The 2009 SAT average scores were recently released and showed the lowest scores of the millennium. Furthermore, only a quarter of graduating high school students who took the ACT were adequately prepared for the rigors of college. While this news alone is unsettling, minority students’ scores lagged still more than in previous years. The drop can be partially attributed to an increase in the number of students taking these standardized tests. According to Diane Costello of Lohud.com, approximately 1.5 million high school students took the ACT, a substantial increase from the 1.3 million in 2007. This, however, is no excuse for low score averages. Many states, including Colorado, Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan and Wyoming require high school juniors to take the ACT or SAT. If you’re going to require students to take tests designed to indicate college potential, you should prepare them properly. While natural ability may play a role in the tests’ outcome (debatable), programs like Kaplan or The Princeton Review make a mint from improving students’ test-taking skills. Ideally then, our publicly funded school systems would provide similar training that students need to succeed on such examinations, and later in institutions of higher learning. Of course, the scores are not only symptomatic of a failing infrastructure, but also of racial inequality in test scores. The gap is remarkably wide. According to the Wall Street Journal, black students trail 99 points behind white students in critical reading, are 121 points behind Asian students in math and 99 points behind Asians in writing. I’d hardly say it smacks of racism — socioeconomic status plays a significant role as well. Not much of an excuse is it, though? The Statue of Liberty states quite adamantly “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" Admittedly, she doesn’t exactly claim to provide substantial welfare or educational benefits, but at this stage of American development, it would be reasonable to assume some basic social infrastructures would be provided for the public good. Wealth, race and geographical location simply shouldn’t bar any individual from success — educational or otherwise. Then again, the government isn’t entirely to blame. Over the course of a 13-year educational career prior to college, the average student spends about 16,380 hours in school, which represents an increase over the past 20 years. Furthermore, per student spending has increased, even as the U.S. fell to 18th in international secondary education rankings. At this point, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put anything back together, let alone a sprawling, multimillion dollar, failed quasi-public industry. Personal responsibility comes in at some point. A culture of malaise or perhaps just indifference seems to have led many to believe that the success of public education relies solely on the government. Read a book. Read your kids a book. If you have trouble with a class, ask a teacher or get a tutor. It might not be easy, it might not be cheap, but it’s something. There might be work without merit, but there certainly is no such thing as achievement ex nihilo. —Thomas Shattuck is a junior in the School of Engineering. He can be reached a thomas.w.shattuck@vanderbilt.edu.