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As a classroom teacher, I hold out little hope for education reform. Even in rural areas, we have a bloated, top-heavy "educrat" bureaucracy that does nothing to improve the quality of education. They're more concerned with trying to snag another government grant, or ensuring they keep enough "special needs" students in the classroom to keep that Title 10 money rolling in.

You know the rest of the story: discipline is an endangered species in today's schools. I teach at a school where our seventh graders (a total of 130 students) have been sent to the office more than 1200 times. You do the math--it's a shocking statistic by any standard. And remember: this is a rural school system, not the innner city. Problem students cycle through the usual punishments--including alernative schools--then start the process over again. The best example of this happened a few days ago. We had a seventh grader "busted" for marijuana possession. He was "sentenced" to two weeks in alternative school, after which he returns to our classrooms. School policy normally calls for suspension for the rest of the school year, but he shows promise as a football player, so we'll cut him some slack, right?

As you can imagine, academic achievement at our school is rock bottom, with little hope for improvement. Half of our seventh graders can't pass the state-mandated math test; twenty-five pecent can't pass the reading test.

Parents who actually care about their child's education have already broken the code; that's why enrollment in private schools is soaring, and the number of home-school kids has increased ten-fold over the past decade.

What happens next? More kids opt for a private education, or the home schooling route. Within 30 years, public schools will consist of systems in urban areas, a few top-notch districts in affulent suburbs, and the rest in rural areas that lack other options. The acheivement gap between private/home school kids and their public school counterparts will be astronomical. That gap will widen until we have a taxpayer revolt, when families with no interest in local schools refuse to pay for failing systems. At that point, our so-called public school system will finally--and fittingly--collapse. And God only knows what shape our country will be in when that happens....