If you compare the average student teacher ratio for all 50 states and look at their ranking, you will find there is no correlation except when it comes to extreme overcrowding ( > 20). The lowest ranked schools often have just as many students per class as higher ranked schools. 15 seems to be optimal but it's no guarantee for success. The worst ranked state has 16 kids per class on average, and so does the 3rd ranked state.

That's why it's comedy.

They would be cheaper obviously but when you're spending millions on the systems themselves, you might as well throw in a few bucks extra to make the container look nice.

"Five hundred million years ago carbon dioxide was 20 times more prevalent than today"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide

Where the dinosaurs driving around in cars?

This only shows the consequences of an earth that heats up. It does not show that man is responsible for the earth heating up or that man has any control over it.

Education had been state run and progressively getting better up until the 1970's when the feds took it over and it has now flat lined for 40 years.

Roads and bridges are also paid for by and maintained by the communities / counties in which they run through.

The Federal Government adds nothing of value to education and minimal value to our roads and bridges.

I have hacked my car so that it no longer tells me I'm out of gas until it actually is.

You need a new job then. Or a different attitude. If you think you need to kill yourself for the 1% then you probably care way too much about money. The reason jobs that require intelligence don't need unions is because companies can not just pick another monkey from the zoo to replace you. You have to set the limits for how much you are willing to work and adjust your salary expectations accordingly. I have a mortgage and can pay all of my bills working about 20 hours a week and that's about as much as I work for pay. I'm also student teaching full time. Once that's over in about 8 weeks I'll be able to work full time for actual pay and have twice as much money as I need every month.

I worked in a small company once with basically me and one other developer. I "unionized" and said "no new bugs for one month" The boss went along with it (didn't have much of a choice, but we sold him on the idea anyway). We spent the entire month cleaning up code and fixing existing bugs. A month later the boss set up a bunch of requirements with a nice bonus if we made the deadline. We made the deadline. We got our way, he got his way. Everyone wins. Having a clean codebase allowed us to do much more work in less time. He just had to leave us alone for one month.

The first step to having a nice work environment is to talk with employees to figure out what "reasonable" is. You can then talk to the boss. As soon as you start threatening "unionization" you're just assuming he's a jerk when that may not be the case.

Until you're 18 you don't have rights, you have privileges. If parents don't like public education and the rules to attend they can go to a private school or home school. This is why it is important to defend both those options and make them as available as possible.

I'm currently student teaching (High School) and there are a lot of reasons not to friend students on Facebook. My current primary reason as a student teacher is that I'm still exploring the limits of personal information / stories that can safely be shared without it coming back as an attempted torture device. I told students I took French in high school and college and a student decided calling me "Frenchie" would be a good idea. I just laughed and said "Say 'chowder'' which defused that right away. Facebook is an unfiltered place to express myself and communicate with friends. The more people you let in the more professional you have to be which is lame. That's not what Facebook is for. Even if the students you friend are responsible with the information during class, they may share stories with other students who are not. Then you get rumors and all kinds of fun stuff. And frankly, I just don't care to keep my Facebook profile PG for the kiddies. I'm an adult that has adult conversations and adult interests.

There are professional channels to use to communicate with students and I don't have a problem talking to students in class about non-class related things. But, it's at my discretion and off the record.

But yes, I agree you should get to know your students. Some of the problem of not knowing them is large class sizes. In my three classes with 15 students each I recognize them all and know their names. In the two classes with nearly 40 students each, I'm still learning names and faces.