I also think that private schools can do a great job of educating, but I think that in most cases their performance roughly parallels the public schools in their neighborhoods.

And I think many private schools have other means of cash in order to charge less in tuition than some public schools spend in tuition. For example, many are religious schools that use religious facilities. Also, teacher pay in private schools is usually about half that of public schools, at least in California, which mainly limits the available pool of teachers to those with spouses that have better-paying jobs. Head Royce, a well-known private school in Oakland, charges about $27,000 tuition per year in its high school, three times the figure you cite, probably almost four times the local rate, since California has among the poorest school funding in the nation. Every school is not Head Royce, but I mention it because such schools are often pointed out to illustrate the superiority of private solutions.

On the other hand, I don't discount your intuitions about government. The whole school board system is problematical, I feel. There should be some other way to provide local control without putting any old Tom Dick and Mary in charge of the schools. I also feel that one of the biggest barriers to progress in this country is a sort-of collusion between government and textbook publishers and test publishers, neither or whom has any interest in changing the system.

Witness what happened at the hands of politicians when real reform gained a toehold in California back during the eighties.

Most teachers I know and also the teacher's unions I've had contact with, are very heavily into reform based on research. It's the intractable resistance from the government, again, at the behest of entrenched publishers, that is the conservative force here.

Was this true only online, or also in the live broadcast?"

I don't care about the order of the athletes so much as the fact that they didn't broadcast it live at all. I had hoped to have watched it at the same time as my friends in Beijing, but was unable to do this. As far as I know, the USA is the only country who failed to broadcast the opening when it really happened. (some, like Canada, broadcast it twice - in real time and later a repeat in the evening.)

In the old days (don't call me geezer!) they did lots of live broadcasting, and, while it was a strain to get up in the middle of the night to see it, there's something about that experience that brings home a real sense of the world, and how big it is. In this case, there's a sense of wonder to the idea that you're watching something at the same time as people all around the world. NBC, unsurprisingly but no less disgustingly, prefers profit over human fellowship.

Of course, if you disagree with my point of view, that's no problem - you can just record it if it's broadcast live in the middle of the night.

What's even more frustrating is that I was unable to find an unblocked stream in another country so I could watch it on my computer. I found out later that some German stations hadn't blocked it. There was an article in the New York times today how NBC kept playing internet "whack a mole" with those who knew how to find a way around their blocking. Well, so much for the idea that the Internet is free. Kind of feels like the West must have felt when they fenced it all in.

actually I'm going to China soon, and I was going to start studying methods of circumventing China's great firewall. I wish I'd started already. Maybe I could (ironically) have used those methods to circumvent the great NBC firewall and watched the feeds from China or Canada.