I guess the rest of the industrialized world has beaten all those problems. They all spend much less. Most have much larger class sizes, older facilities, fewer resources and virtually no support staff but somehow they are ahead of the US in nearly every measure of academic achievement. Before you repeat the standard cant of the education establishment perhaps you will look at the rest of the world and explain how they can do so much better with less. Within the US, why do the lowest spending states routinely outperform the highest spending states? I agree with you that ADD or whatever is massively over diagnosed. Somehow teachers used to keep order with larger average class sizes and no drugs. My knuckles were rapped and my butt beat on more tha one occasion. Much better option than filling a kid with behavior/mood altering drugs.

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.