dances_with_barka...@yahoo.com wrote:

what will be the actual outcome of the latest law (assuming funds get
appropriated) - a larger education bureaucracy? young people keeping
their noses clean, but not really giving a damn, during the required
minimum time duration doing quasi "national service" teaching in the
schools, in return for a later lifetime of making big bucks in
industry? An explosion of math and science knowledge in the general
populace?

Floor is open.

The 2006 California State budget allocated $40.1 billion for K-12
education, 30+% of everything. Toss in brutal county land taxes.
What would you add to that to make public education "work"? Like any
government program it abundantly creates exactly what it claims to
purchase, albeit 2(pi) steradians in the opposite direction.

Education worked splendidly from the 1850s through the 1960s. Wave
after wave of the most impossibly inert English-unabled immigrant
minds were brought into American society. Even the Irish were
educated (Boston and Chicago). CUNY was a Nobel Laureate factory.
This was achieved without small class sizes, teacher's aides, carpeted
schools, air conditioning, Ritalin and Adderall... in the most heinous
social squalor imaginable. Slum bunnies worked in sweatshops without
labor laws, without gratis medical care. They starved year 'round,
and froze to death in winter.

Starting in the late 1960s, US public education utterly collapsed.
Pick your (combination) of reasons,

1) "Landslide Lyndon" Johnson's "Great Society" vigorously
subsidized poverty. There was no reason to bust a hump anymore. The
Feds even delivered the checks to you.

2) The Community threatened (and delivered) civil disorder unless
all objective quality standards were removed from public education.
Stupidity was discriminatory, as was achievement.

3) Blacks and Browns as groups are inherently ineducable in a
technological society. Intelligence testing worldwide supports this
in education, industry, and the military - "The Bell Curve."
Renormalize testing!