Let's talk about the school thing and assume your figures are right about the per-student dollars being spent on education.

Just perhaps Tom, did the money get redirected to stuff that required lots of administration and .....testing? Perhaps we're not spending wisely today because the teachers and local administrators are no longer allowed to make decisions about how to educate but instead the huge push by your party for metrics took over and sucked up all the funds.

It sure seems that the brunt of the heavy-handedness fell on the teachers. All the questions about why schools were failing assumed not that parents weren't doing their part or that schools were being deluged with huge numbers of children from poorer and poorer neighborhoods but that the target was obviously bad teachers. The hammer came down and guess what Tom? With that hammer came profit, massive profits to industries owned by your guys, the testing corporations, the textbook makers, the fly by night teacher certification programs that were mandatory for those instructors to take. In our state those things weren't pushed by Democrats Tom. They were forced on the educational system by the "conservatives" that have been in charge of my state for most of my life.

As you state, the teachers salaries didn't really go up and if they did, there was always a catch. While the overall budget appeared to be rising dramatically, the schools in the lower income levels saw little of the extra funds unless it came with mandates that spent it all on forced programs. Now the schools in the richest parts of our state had all the best stuff. Property taxes saw to that. Our own state Supreme Court found that our system of funding was unconstitutional yet it took nearly a decade for the legislature here to do anything about it. It was all smoke and mirrors though. New and devious laws were enacted that allowed people to directly contribute to their children's schools and get tax breaks for it. Of course that came out of the general fund so the areas where the parents had no money to donate got ripped off as always.

Of course all this meddling takes paperwork and a huge administrative staff. That's where a large part of the additional dollars you cite go, not into the classroom.

So how do we resolve this problem? It's simple. Get the Federal and the state governments out of educational micromanagement. They know nothing about children. The person that knows how to educate your child isn't some test or some federally designed reading program. It's their teacher. Remove all the mandates except add one new one - restrict the number of administrative staff members a district can have based on its student load and limit pay they can receive if they're taking government dollars. Equalize taxing schemes so all districts get exactly the same amount of money per child and remove all tax incentives and loopholes for the rich to be able to supplement their own kid's school. Take away all talk of vouchers. They won't work for anyone but the wealthy. Public schools don't get better when they're forced to compete with private industry. They get swallowed because of unfair competition. The rich will game the system to have the government pay for their children's private schools.

That's just a start. I've gotten decades of insight from my wife who teaches in a poorer and primarily Hispanic school district. Money isn't the only problem. Micromanagement is and every time it's been ratcheted up, it's come from our extremely conservative Republican leadership. Without a few Democratic governors to slow them down a bit with a veto pen, they would have destroyed public education in our state.

Art