Re: Mary Anne's post below.

So what's your ideal student:teacher ratio? 30:1? 40:1?



We had 52:1 in my second grade. I was the remedial reading teacher, because I was already reading above a second-grade level and the teacher figured it gave me something to do. No kidding. Lest we wonder where part of my POV comes from.

It was also a Catholic school, so expulsion for less-than-felonious behavior was also an option. Private organizations can do that.



I would bet a week's salary that your Catholic school did a better job of educating a class of fifty-two than most modern public schools do with a class of twenty. You certainly don't seem to be a dummy. Many of our greatest people were educated in one-room schools where, yes, the upper classes helped teach the younger ones. You obviously see this as a negative. I'm not sure why.

There is no ideal teacher ratio. A great teacher can handle a class of fifty students and get results. A crappy teacher will not get results with five students. And everywhere in between.

Statistics have shown that recent highly expensive efforts here in California to reduce class sizes have had no perceptible results in education quality. In fact, it just means a larger pool of unqualified teachers has been drawn into the schools.

The public education establishment does not have the goal of educating students. It has the goal of increasing its size and power. Whether little Johnny learns to read is as irrelevant to them as insuring a decent retirement income for the elderly is irrelevant to the Social Security program.

Why do you think the public education bureaucracy is terrified of school vouchers? The poor and minorities support vouchers in droves, so it can't be concern for them or their wants.

In fact, the education bureaucrats have said exactly what they are afraid of. With refreshing honesty, they say that their greatest fear is that if parents are given the resources to find alternatives to public, that they would flee the public education system in hordes like rats from a burning ship. This would not be "fair." Fair to who? No one is ever quite clear on this. And no one seems to pay attention to what this reveals about the public education system.

So their objective is to force parents to keep their kids in an inferior system, to maintain "fairness." Again, concern for the students' education is apparently quite low on the priority list.

To accomplish this the bureaucrats usually raise horseshit objections about "separation of church and state" if someone uses a voucher to go to one of those aggravatingly-effective Catholic schools. Why state scholarships to Notre Dame don't fall into this category is more than I can figure out. Or they make objections about parents choosing "odd" or "bad" schools, since parents are ever so dim and need to be led around by the nose.

We went through a voucher proposition election here a while back. A proposition that--California-style--had quite lenient, "hundred flowers" views on what, exactly, a "school" was. You should have heard the NEA howl. Believe me, I've heard them all.

"What if people put their kids in a school for witchcraft?" was an actual quote. Well, so? Maybe they want their kids to be witches (this predated Harry Potter by some years). What business is it of yours? More realistically, how many sensible adults would actually put their kids in witch school?

"What if some crook opens a school just to get voucher funds, and parents stick their kids in there?" Of course, to the bureaucrats everyone is an idiot except a bureaucrat. My wife and I studied our local public schools thoroughly before putting our kids in one. We were lucky enough to live in an area populated enough to give us a choice. Why wouldn't any parent do the same?

Oh well. The scare tactics worked, the vouchers were defeated, and our education system eats more money every year and our kids keep getting stupider.

Ideally, of course, schools would be completely private, but a voucher system, although it uses taxpayer funding, is at least a step in the right direction.