Imagine how things would be different if education were treated as a national defense issue Good grief, Scott. The problem with unions and/or education is that

Imagine how things would be different if education were treated as a national defense issue Good grief, Scott. The problem with unions and/or education is that we keep trying to make one-size-fits-all solutions, eventually treating our children (and teachers) like widgets in a factory. So the teachers and children have started acting like we've been treating them. Further nationalizing it isn't going to help any -- it'll just make matters worse. Each student is a complicated problem on his or her own. That makes each class an even more complicated problem. We need to be able to give people the freedom and accountability to leverage local minima and maxima, not come up with imaginations of how various global solutions might work. School boards alone have too much concentrated power and make too many global rules. It just gets worse the higher up the chain you go. The way we got here was through a long string of really smart folks imagining what magic bullet might fix things for everybody -- it will not be the way we get out. EDIT: Interesting trivia point: one of the big pushes for centralized education "reform" originally in the states was that in WWI the soldiers had a hard time working the artillery. It was thought that we had better start having national standards of education so that we could be assured future soldiers would be able to fight effectively. Seems like we will never escape well-meaning people using bad military analogies. La plus ca change...