WAKE UP AMERICA: OUR STUPID WASTEFUL PUBLIC SCHOOLS

Administration of our stupid public schools by wasteful overpaid administrators and idle local and state school boards gets worse and worse.

Get this, according to Michael Antonucci’s fine Education Intelligence Agency newsletter:

“Teacher hiring is completely out of control.”

For the 2006-2007 school year, America’s public schools had 52,000 new kindergarten through Grade 8 students, yet hired 42,500 new kindergarten through Grade 8 teachers – that’s one more teacher for every 1.2 extra students.

Average pay for each new teacher: $47,602 in public schools, $36,630 in Catholic parochial schools, $27,210 in private schools.

Hullo?

Antonucci, the best national education reporter in the country, concludes: “No one will note the one astonishing statistic that greatly explains why all the revenue and expenditure numbers are where they are. Teacher hiring is completely out of control.

“Yes, believers in the eternal teacher shortage, you read that correctly. A trend that was obvious after last year's edition of [the National Education Association’s] Rankings and Estimates is now glaring. The last of the baby-boomer's kids are working their way through high school and they are not being replaced.”

While school enrollment is increasing by just two-tenths of one percent at the elementary level and just six-tenths of one percent at the high school level nationally, the number of elementary school teachers has increased 1.9-million, 42.5 percent, and the number of high school teachers, grades 9 through 12, has increased by 1.3 million, 10.2 percent.

Whoa. Give them a bessamé mucho. They want it badly or have to go into rehab at taxpayer expense. Guess what? It's all at our expense, not theirs. Never their expense. They just sit around and tell each other what idiots we are while they sponge us to death.

Antonucci reports: “That's right. America hired 42,541 extra elementary school teachers for 51,958 extra elementary school students. That's one extra teacher for every 1.2 extra students. This is not a new trend, only an accelerated one. In the last 10 years, K-8 enrollment has risen by a cumulative 4.1 percent. But the K-8 teaching forced has risen by a cumulative 17.1 percent.

“If the national picture seems insane, consider California. NEA estimates a 48,031 student decrease in K-8 enrollment for 2006-07, but an increase of 9,284 K-8 teachers.

“NEA estimates K-8 average salaries increased 4.2 percent in 2006-07, which means we are paying a premium for all those extra teachers. So while NEA decries the failure of average salaries to match inflation, the fact that public school districts can so massively increase the number of teachers at the bottom end of the scale, while still increasing the average salary by a substantial amount, is a testament to the ability of government to appropriate money for education.”

Is this not insanity?

Our education establishment and politicians tied to their propaganda machine keep telling us we need to spend more for public schools.

Wrong.

We need to stop the ridiculous inflation of public school salaries and administrative costs as the rise in public school student enrollment is stagnant.

What don’t we see here?

Hiring of more and more public school teachers and administrators with all their huge benefits and annually-pegged salary increases, while student enrollment increases have stalled, is a horrible rip-off of taxpayers.

Certainly student learning is not increasing. Get a load of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores that show a constant academic decline of student knowledge and learning over the past decades, going down every year at every grade level while pay for school staff goes up and up.

Taxpayers are getting less and less bang for their school bucks every year, while public schools are increasing their teacher and administrator ranks way beyond our childrens’ needs, and the schools aren't doing the job of teaching and learning.

This is a huge government swindle. When will we as a public swing into action to end this rip-off?

It’s the biggest rip-off imaginable because it's killing our children in their mandatory so-called "education" environment and killing our country in worldwide economic competition.

Wake up America.