The pleasure of seeing Lebron James, a pompous, entitled, smug, illiterate roundball player being pilloried for his arrogance in thinking that his money and face was sufficient to create some sort of little Harvard on the Cuyahoga is delicious. But this miserable situation exposes the horrendous state of American education, and proves that the mantra of the teachers and their hard-left unions that money will fix everything is an evil, craven strategy to enrich them at the expense of the country and its children.

LeBron James's school of failed promises

NBA megastar LeBron James once said, “being black in America is tough.” If that’s true, then his “I Promise School” has made it even tougher. The students at the school, 60% of whom are black, cannot pass state-issued math tests. Not one eighth grade student passed an arithmetic test in three years, according to reports. It’s an embarrassment and unmitigated disaster for James, who has been a frequent know-it-all and outspoken critic on social issues.

The news of the “I Promise School” was initially met with great fanfare when it opened in 2018. The school benefited from a trove of resources from one of the country’s wealthiest celebrities. Stories of how great the kids were doing dominated the news initially. James was heralded as a hero. But just a couple of years after it opened its doors, it failed to uphold its most basic responsibility: educate children. James’s educational initiative quickly unraveled into a school of failed promises.

But along the way, courtesy of the insanity of the 1960s, our education system was turned on its head, and the techniques that had educated millions were no longer considered acceptable, for many opaque reasons, but of course the real reason was that it was traditional, and it worked.

But black America got a double shot of failure, as LBJ's Great Society took the burgeoning black middle class and turned it into a dependent, passive, democrat-voting pressure group whose children no longer had the benefit of strong social connections via two-parent households, church and school.

The results were predictable.

The list of black America's ills is long and painful, and our education system has spent 50 years doing nothing to fix anything on that list. So buying the best that a failed system can offer is itself a recipe for failure, which is why Lebron James' vanity project is a catastrophe.

What's the solution? It's long and painful and requires the destruction of most of higher education, which is the source for most of the nonsense going on in our K-12 public schools. Until education majors are taught reading and writing and 'rithmatic, along with history and civics; nothing will change. Until post-modern, woke insanity is banished from public education; nothing will change. Until the teachers unions are destroyed; nothing will change.

And for black America, until education is valued more than three-point shots and rapping; nothing will change.