Education

    The longer one spends in education the more new programs, state and nation wide initiatives, new curriculum, and new strategies you experience.  Moreover, each year teachers and prospective teachers have to take more classes and tests and evaluations to obtain and maintain their certification.  Yet, even after all of this effort society at large is still generally dissatisfied with the state of education.  You can hear and read reports about how America no longer leads the world in the education of its citizens.  The response to this state is the continual tweaking of the educational model in the hopes of finding the answer.  In reality, the root aim of these efforts is to increase the efficiency of the educator and the educational system.  Better teachers and better schools equal better students, it makes perfect sense right?  But it doesn't.  Even with the most scientifically awesome curriculum and several massive buckets of funding I believe that the gains would  ultimately be unsatisfactory.  However, we are assured that the new system will punch through the ceiling of student achievement.
    The problem is that a system can only become so efficient before the return in performance per dollar increase in funding would become minimal.  It would not be worth the expenditure.  The law of diminishing returns.  This though is not really a problem because education has never received tons of funding to begin with when compared to other government spending programs.  Yet, the politics of education demands that "something" is done so teachers have to continually prove and refine their proficiency or lose their job.  However, teacher proficiency suffers from the same law of diminishing returns.  No matter what we do we will never create the army of super teachers that can have an entire class of hard luck cases and petty criminals reading at grade level while paying wrapped attention, hanging on every word, running to class in order to start learning as soon as possible.  "But wait," you say, "I've seen _________ movie and read _________book where Mr/Mrs _________reaches those hard luck cases in the inner city, I cried, and we can all be teachers like that."  Bullshit.  These individual cases are the exceptions and not the rules.  It is a fallacy to believe these individual cases can ever become the norm.
    So the problem is that the politics of education works only one side of the teacher/student equation, the teacher side.  They work it and work it and wonder why the miracle never occurs.  Lets look at two schools (names removed to CYA).  School A is a school made up of mostly white middle class children who have no problem passing all state tests.  Using the logic of our system School A must have the best teachers.  Conversely, School B, made up of mostly poor Hispanic students, struggles to get their graduation rate over 50%.  Using our logic their teachers must be vastly inferior to the teachers at School A.  I think we all know what the real problem is.  It is the side of the equation that America is afraid to tackle, the place they dare not look.