I don’t – I don’t think he or anyone that I’ve listened to for the 35 years I taught or the other 17 or so I spent going to school has a clue. The states spend somewhere in the neighborhood of 600 billion dollars per year on education while the fed throws in about a one tenth of that (68.6 billion). I’m not sure that the amount the fed throws in is part of the 600 billion total but anyway we might all agree that we spend enough. It is just so inefficient on how we spend it. However, we get exactly what we want. We don’t expect public schools to just educate. If you think it is just to educate then you don’t understand what “public education” means. It is like limited parenting. The kids aren’t just cared for they are mothered and fathered in a limited way. So, just sitting in a classroom and doing the school work is not what we mean by public education. But the greatest obstacle to actually create a education system is the 50 state governments and thousands of individual school boards that are each unique in how they govern their districts. There are too many buses, too many buildings, too many administrators – there is more overlap than anyone could ever imagine. The real problem is that there aren’t enough teachers – more than half of the employees of the public schools are not teachers! No one including Obama who has the same idiot idea that Charter schools rate with sliced bread ever talks about getting the public school systems off the political table and fixing the real problems. Maybe there is no fix – maybe we just keep it as is and constantly bitch about the teachers. But the way it is at this time is because of parents, local school boards, state legislatures, federal mandates, and awful court decisions. If you or Chancellor Rhee think its about teachers then start naming them and what they did or didn’t do and I’d bet you that you would find out that what they did of didn’t do was mandated by somebody somewhere.

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