Comment Re:$100 million (Score 1) 95
There certainly is a lot of budget that is wasted or abused in public schools, and bureaucracy and teacher's unions contribute much to that,...
Hmmm. I'm with you on the bureaucracy part, but I don't think it's just about money. You can't have a good school system without well paid teachers, good facilities and materials, and an environment that helps kids want to learn.
The town I live in is a "bedroom community" with little or no commercial tax base. Down the road a bit, is a wealthy town, with a lot of multi-million dollar mansions and a fairly good commercial tax base. Our town struggles to fund our schools, while the wealthy town has all the extras. Our kids still do well, mostly because we have a small group of dedicated teachers (unionized) who care. They aren't paid like the teachers in the wealthy town, and they are currently being strangled with more paperwork and requirements in order to remain licensed, thanks to the sentiment that "we need to weed out all the bad teachers" which is currently in vogue. Many older more experienced teachers are retiring, rather than put up with the additional burden.
What's my point? Education is in a crisis, but I strongly disagree that it's because of teacher unions, at least in my town. The "Kansas attitude", religious and political interference with curriculum, is one cause. The political push for constant testing and debate over metrics is another. The battle over Common Core is a third. It seems that the new attitude is to dumb down the curriculum, test more and then wonder why kids are still getting lower grades. Perhaps we should let the teachers work it out, instead of the politicians, demagogues and publishing companies?