The geniuses of the left have come up with a way to improve education – from Yahoo News:

How would the nation’s school system be different if teachers were paid like engineers?

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan proposed last month that a significant boost in teacher salaries could transform public schools for the better by luring the country’s brightest college graduates into the profession.

Teachers should be paid a starting salary of $60,000, Duncan said, with the opportunity to make up to $150,000 a year…

Yeah, that’ll fix it.  The only problem we have with education is that we’re not spending enough money on it.  If we just “invest” a bit more, all will be well.

The truth is that we spend plenty of money on education – in fact, probably many times more than we need to.  But the funds are misapplied because the education system – from pre-school through graduate school – is not geared towards providing education for kids, but for providing well paid positions for incompetents.  Fundamental to this are teacher’s unions and tenure.  Get rid of the unions and tenure, and you’ll fix education within, at most, two or three years.  There will no longer be protection for idiocy, and so the natural common sense of humanity will start to take hold.

To be sure, a lot of other particular bits of reform spring to mind – such as, why do we provide loans, grants and scholarships for kids to become lawyers?  We have more than enough lawyers in the United States – but not nearly enough engineers and doctors.  So, cancel all loans, grants and scholarships for law degrees and re-direct the funds to medicine and engineering.  But that is in the details – and such reforms will always be stymied because of the main things wrong with education:  unions and tenure.  Unions and tenured educators don’t want their place at the trough disturbed and so strangle every effort at reform…while on the other hand they are always quick to come up with their own “reform” efforts which invariably demand more money for the worthless education system we already have.

George Will called the events in Wisconsin the “Waterloo” of the left…it may well have been.  Unions were taken head on and defeated…and the people of Wisconsin are already seeing the improvements in government finance, the Wisconsin economy and Wisconsin education.  Here’s the real kicker – there is more money in the Wisconsin education budget for hiring and paying teachers, now that the unions are cut out of the loop.   Once the word starts to get out that getting rid of the unions is just about a silver bullet, more and more unions will be got rid of.  It will snowball.

Eventually we can start educating the kids, again…and that will do more than anything else to restore American greatness.