Recommended: Waiting for Superman

If Director Davis Guggenheim's film Waiting for Superman doesn't make you fighting mad about the state of education in this country, you have no heart.

I have argued repeatedly in this blog (as recently as yesterday, in fact) that America needs to wake up and fix it's K-12 school systems. It needs to scrap the teacher's union contracts, pay the great teachers 6-figure salaries and fire the poor teachers however much seniority they have, prune the local, state and federal educational bureaucracies to a tenth their size or less and shift all that money into the schools, dump the stupid courses in "Teacher Degree Courses" and make the education of teachers much more demanding, and DEMAND better performance from the school systems.

It ought to be HARD to get through teacher's college, and HARD to earn a teaching position, and HARD to keep it. Only the best ought to be able to manage it, but for those who manage it we ought to pay very, very good wages. After all, they quite literally hold the future of the nation in their hands -- far more than any politician.

This will be hard. There are lots of people who will lose their jobs, and they clearly care more about holding onto their jobs than about the quality of education kids are getting, whatever they may say in public. And there are lots of politicians who are in the pockets of the unions. And there are lots of people in the bloated educational bureaucracy who might have to go find useful work for a change.

But it's not rocket science. There are plenty of successful models to follow. Finland has an outstanding school system, at half the cost per pupil than the American average. South Korea, Canada, Japan, New Zealand.... there are lots of good models. In fact, we have good models even here in America, among some charter schools, magnet schools and private schools.

Nor is this hidden knowledge. There have been endless articles in Time and The New Yorker, and many other magazines, any number of documentaries about it, any number of people like Bill Gates testifying to Congress about it. Any number of academic studies have shown what works and what doesn't work. The message is simple:

Good education comes from having great teachers. Not average teachers. Not good teachers. GREAT teachers. They are as rare as any other high skill resource. To have a great educational system, one needs to attract great teachers, train them well, pay them enough to keep them, and get out of their way -- meaning not have a mass of local, state and federal bureaucrats micromanaging them.

So it's clear what needs to be done. And it is clear it won't happen until enough American parents rise up in fury at what is being done to their children. So if we parents and grandparents and great grandparents won't stand up against the unions and politicians and special interests for the welfare of the children of this nation, we deserve what we get, and we will get it good and hard (to paraphrase H.L. Mencken).