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"For crying out loud, some of you people are utterly unreasonable."

Unreasonable? Try telling the staff of a union-represented school that you're going to implement mandatory subject knowledge and performance standards for teachers, and that if they don't exceed a certain level of performance that their tenure will be set aside and they'll be let go.

People are sick and tired of asking for a modest level of performance from a public education system that for over forty years has increased in cost at twice the speed of inflation. People are sick and tired of hearing that it costs nearly $100,000 to get a kid through 12th grade and by the time the taxpayers have been sufficiently raped, hearing that any given high school graduate is as likely as not to have basic skill levels that would have been dwarfed by a eighth grade kid educated in a one-room schoolhouse just 100 years ago.

The American public education system is a national disgrace--a national disaster.

From the 1983 report, "A NATION AT RISK":

Commenting on the state of the American public education system:

"If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war."

"We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament."

People are sick and tired of asking for a modest level of performance from a public education system that for over forty years has increased in cost at twice the speed of inflation.

There are a number of reasons for that increase in cost, and not all of them have to do with classroom instruction. For instance, in many districts, the number of administrators and central office personnel, and the salaries of the same, have ballooned.

Many parents now expect their children to learn using computers and other technology that is a tiny bit more expensive than a chalkboard.

And then we have special education. Some of the children who are now in public school would have been in institutions 40 years ago. I don't doubt that the parents need some respite, but some of the children are not being educated, they are just being cared for, and it's expensive.

Nothing is quite as simplistic as you'd like it to be, I'm afraid.