As I mentioned before, I would like to see a voucher system. What that means is parents have the amount of money that goes to educate their children in the public school system. They can home school, request a district transfer to a school they prefer (for example, near where they work) or it could go to a private school.

The one hang up is using federal money for sectarian schools. And the problem has been most people writing up voucher proposals have a religious or even racial agenda.

This is the reality of public schools. The largest part of every dollar is spend on transportation and administration. Transportations is the largest part of Special Edcation for the students that need special adapted buses with wheelchair lifts, etc... For most larger school districts, administration takes a enormous amount of money. It is not uncommon for such districts with Superintendents making $175k to $200k, then they will require a high paid head secretary (75k) and Assistant Superintendent ($110-$125k). Then you have Principals ($75k-$100k), and Assistant or Vice Principals ($65k-$80k). A veteran teacher will make $60-$80k). Then some teachers have Teacher Assistants / Paraprofessionals to help hand English as a second language students or special needs students ($10.50 p hr to $15 p hr partime).

The classroom instruction itself recieves pennies on every dollar spent on education.

And school districts in rapid growth regions cannot build new schools fast enough to keep up with the increase in enrollment and area population.

Nationwide, the No Child Left Behind bureaucracy has become a gang of high test score fixate Nazis. Enrichment programs and programs based on science experiments, art and craft tie in activies, acting out plays representing periods of history, the school garden, etc... are becoming rare while teaching using drill and kill techniques teach toward specific questions on the academic tests. Most of those questions require filling in bubbles in multiple choice questions. So students are becoming skilled bubblers but are lost with their creativity, or high critical thinking skills.

The real life situation can be emulated best in schools by students forming cooperative learning teams to solve problems as they would do on most jobs. Even a construction job from start to finish would require mathematics and geometry. This style of instruction is the best match to a real world situation in a career job, but the priority of No Child Left Behind is to crank out skilled bubblers.

I really think the answer is at the STATE level and coming up with a comprehensive voucher system that is not generated from specific religious or special interest groups.

__________________
National Debt =