A number of years ago I was legislator here in Iowa. The teachers union and school administrators were ALWAYS screaming for more money. It turns out that, adjusted for inflation, we were spending more than twice as much per pupil as we had thirty years earlier and student achievement had gone down. This is a national phenomenon. Spending has skyrocketed as performance has plummeted. There is no positive correlation between per pupil spending or teachers salaries and performance. The American Legislative Exchange Council, an association of mostly conservative state legislators, has tracked this for years and has data going back, in some cases, 100 years. State by state and international comparisons of almost every conceivable area are available on their website. Most of the data is from the US Dept of Education, state education departments and testing services. Whenever I hear some educrat claim that they could solve all the problems with education, if they only had more money, I just take out my copy of ALEC’s annual report card and shoot them down in flames.

For those of you that want to look it up, try here: http://www.alec.org/task-forces/education

We all like to think of ourselves as rugged individualists. But when push comes to shove most of us are sheep who do what we are told. Worst of all, a lot of us become unpaid agents of whoever is controlling the agenda by enforcing the current dogma on the few rugged individualists who actually exist.