: Garloo: There are, in fact, historic amounts of tax money being dumped into education in America these days. About $9,000 per student in MN. Yet there has never been a link between high spending and high test scores presumably because the money never makes it to the classroom. SDF: California, the least-spending of American public school systems, also has the worst scores. There's your link for you.
: There are scores of assistant principles, associate principles, assistants to the associate principles, councelors, grief councelors, child-welfare-hug-developement-workers, peer group specialist, child developement workers, child psycologists, motivational mentors, trans-gendered-health-and-wellness commitees and the rest of that hooey, all making as much as three times the salary of the average teacher.
SDF: "Scores!" This is just propaganda. Care to substantiate the "extent of the problem" with any statistics not fabricated by Rush Limbaugh? The schools where I teach have no school psychologists, or counselors of any sort, maybe an assistant principal if they're lucky. Meanwhile school facilities nationwide are falling apart for lack of repair monies.
: As one of the largest supporters of the DFL, the tenured teachers will do little to reform the problem from within. The DFL fights to keep their hapless dupe programs in place and throw a little more of my money at the problem so they can look good and stay in office. They promise the teachers union that they will vote down tuition tax credits and school vouchers, anything that would benefit the private schools and the children that might potentially better themselves there. It stinks. Throwing more tax money at the problem won't fix it. Privatisation will.
SDF: The track record of voucher systems is that they make both private and public schools worse, as substantiated in a Martin Carnoy article I cited here. Never mind that the above propaganda is a mere echo of the union-busting rhetoric of George HW Bush and his Republican Party stooges, basically a bunch of name-calling with no track record of substantiated presentation of evidence behind it -- its author has nothing to say about what counts as BETTER TEACHING, the only way you're going to get better schools IS through better teaching, something no market system will give you if all or even most of the teachers are lousy.
