Dept.: Our Collapsing Schools

Michelle at a small victory links to this short piece at National Review's The Corner

STARVE THE BEAST [John Derbyshire]
I urge all my fellow Long Islanders who read The Corner to go out and vote down the school budgets being presented to us today. In my town, the budget proposal asks for an increase of 5.52 percent over last year. Did your family's income increase 5.52 percent last year? If not, you can't afford this budget. The only way to kill socialism is to starve the beast--cut off its food supply. Vote down the budget and keep voting it down, till the school boards get the message that in tough times, the public sector has to tighten its belt with the rest of us. Similarly, when you vote for school board members, vote for the ones who are NOT shills for the public-sector unions. It's not hard to figure out who they are from their mission statements.

Michelle's response is worth the read.

I'd like to add my 2¢:

My sister is a public school teacher. She's a damned good one, too. I don't know anyone who works harder at a job than she does, and anyone who believes that it's the teachers who are primarily at fault hasn't been paying attention. The problem has two origins, the top: administration, starting at the Department of Education and falling all the way down to the school district; and the bottom: the parents who use the school system as daycare. Yes, there are some really bad teachers out there, but it's the job of the administration to weed them out. And it's the job of the parents to ensure that they do.

I'm with Derbyshire - STARVE THE BEAST. Perhaps then the bloated administration will have to be cut, and perhaps then the merely unaware parents will have to become involved.

Every other solution I've got involves tar, feathers, and rails.