Mini Edu-rant/Weekend OTA – third world county

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In a WSJ/OpinionJournal piece, “Educating From the Bench” we find these lil mals mots *heh* The lede:

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark.–Spending on public schools nationwide has skyrocketed to $536 billion as of the 2004 school year, or more than $10,000 per pupil. That’s more than double per pupil what we spent three decades ago, adjusted for inflation–and more than we currently spend on national defense ($494 billion as of 2005).

Imagine that. “Adjusted for inflation”–more than double the expenditure per pupil than thirty years ago.

Is anyone prepared to argue that the results are students who are twice as well-educated? Anyone, I mean, apart from a complete idiot. And is there anyone who can reasonably argue that, since more than doubling the expenditure per pupil–remember, adjusted for inflation–has resulted in LESS literate, LESS capable students, that we should spend our way out of the education mess we are in by throwing more good money after bad money?

Well, the idiots in the courts are saying exactly that:

In 2001 the [Arkansas] state Supreme Court declared the amount of money spent at that time–more than $7,000 per pupil–in violation of the state constitutional requirement to provide a “general, suitable and efficient” system of public education.

And just who did the court there (as courts elsewhere have done) hire as “outside consultants” to determine what should be spent?

A firm led by two education professors, Lawrence Picus and Allan Odden, was paid $350,000 to put a price tag on what would be considered adequate.

Talk about setting the foxes to guard the henhouse! If “education professors” were competent to “fix” the problems they have largely been responsible for creating, then they’d not be education professors but professors of something useful, like physics or chemistry or math or (non-post-postmodern deconstructionist/non-feminist, etc.) professors of history or English literature (who had actually read, you know, real English literature or real history, such as Shakespeare or Johnson or Macaulay or Herodotus or…you get the drift) instead of pseudo-babble for the lowest common denominator.

A pox on all their houses: judges, education professors, administrators all.

And a special curse for parents who let themselves be scammed out of an education for their children because they are too stupid, lazy or uncaring to demand better: may your children grow up to an awareness of just how horribly you have let them be cheated.

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