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Outrages

  

9486 in the collection  

    Schools Must Adapt to Markets, Too

    Ohanian Comment: Occasionally I feel driven to post a reallly ugly letter. Doesn't this make you wonder what on earth "productivity per teacher" is? Maybe this fellow is ticked off that schools haven't yet instituted Bill Gates' double-decker desks strategy, outlined in his letter to Arne in May.

    I suspect the additional employees are busy doing paperwork required by NCLB and RTTT.

    by Robert Seiler

    Mike Antonucci's comments (Notable & Quotable, June 2) regarding the decrease of 157,000 students nationwide but an increase of 81,246 teachers from 2008 to 2009, clearly point out a very real problem in our public education K-12 system. However, he doesn't go far enough in demonstrating the magnitude of the problem.

    Productivity per teacher seems clearly to be going down sharply. Even if we assume that school administrators and school boards saw and sought to correct the problem, it would probably take years to do so due to hassles with the unions, etc., resulting in hundreds of millions of dollars of waste.

    If the average business, having the assets and revenue of the average school district, knew so little about the demographics of its "customer" base as the school districts and acted in the same fashion as the schools, it would be out of business. The school districts make up for their mistakes by forcing their "customers" to pay more for the service. And we, the taxpayers continue to allow them to do so. Who is really to blame? We taxpayers are, for putting up with mismanagement of our public education system.

    — Robert Seiler
    Wall Street Journal letter
    2011-06-08

    INDEX OF OUTRAGES

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