re: #27 Dark_Falcon

We wouldn’t actually need to raise spending that much once we’d gotten rid of the waste and dud teachers. The problem you’d face is the unions. You normally can’t fire a teacher simply because they don’t do the job well.

I truly think you have that very backwards. The teacher’s union is the only reason they make a reasonable salary at all. Further it is only because of the union that teachers have had any leverage to make stands and do controversial things like teach evolution or whatever other true facts might offend some idiot parent or church group.

Education is a you get what you pay for proposition. If you have as your teacher pool only the few idealists who love the job and the rest as shlubs who fell into the job, this is the result. If education budgets are always amongst the first to suffer, this is what you get. If the funding for a school is based on property taxes, then you guarantee that poor areas must make due with much less.

The bottom line is that Americans need to realize that when it comes to a high school, you vote to expand the history department before you build another baseball field. Further, they need to get the fact that they do not get to vote on what the facts are. Truth is not a democracy. It is what it is regardless of popularity, and the ignorant have no business whatsoever trying to impose their opinions on it as if their opinions mattered at all.

If we had a sensible system, we would have massive federal funding for all public schools with strict minimum standards for course materials. With that funding, we would insure that schools are secure and that there are enough teachers to make certain that the bright kids go to classes for the bright, the kids with the most needs get special care and the ones in the middle get enough attention to keep them pushing and to help get them unstuck, rather than having one teacher trying to teach to the middle of 40 kids.