h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I disagree with your statement that the school voucher initiative lost by a "slim margin." In fact, it lost by a very wide margin, with 70% "no" votes to 30% "yes" votes.

In fact, the last time they tried to get this thing passed, they lost by a fairly wide margin, about 60 to 40, as I recall.

Personally, I voted against it because I thought that that no matter how bad schools are now, instituting a voucher program would have turned out even worse. If one thinks that the school bureaucracy is huge now, imagine how enormous a money distribution system needed for school vouchers would have to be.

I think the sad state of schools in California is due to three things:

1. Teaching is one of the lowest paid professions one can have. In a place like California, most young, talented people are going into lucrative private business rather than teaching. It's so bad that teachers in the San Francisco Bay Area literally can't afford to pay rent. The solution to this would be to pay teachers more, rather than spend massive amounts of money on some voucher initiative.

2. California, being a very liberal place, has been subject to way too many "experiments" in education. I've lost count of the lame things that were teachers were forced to do with their students because some administrator was persuaded to institute a new way of teaching, when the old way worked perfectly fine.

3. The enormous bureaucracy wastes a large amount of the money we put into it. As you said, California spends more per student than anywhere else, and we're still really bad in the nation. The money has to go somewhere, and I think it goes into wasteful programs and bureaucracy. Unfortunately, the people with the power to get rid of this waste are the very people causing the waste and possibly benefiting from it.

I'd heard on the radio the day after the election that the school voucher initiative had only failed by something like a 56% vote for no. But then again, this is radio news, so it isn't the most reliable of sources.

Actually, teachers in California make a pretty good wage. I'm in computers, which is one field people go to make money, but after 8 years in the field, my friend the music teacher is making substantially more than I am. And I'm not exactly hurting for cash myself.

The bureacracy is exactly the problem. There is tons of money in the system, but there are all kinds of rediculous rules involved with how you can spend it. So while the district pisses away millions on field trips, decorations, and portable classroom rentals (as opposed to the one-time expense of simply building a permanent structure), my cousin doesn't have a book for her high school World History class, and my friend the music teacher ends up buying sheet music for her students out-of-pocket.

I'm sorry for your cousin and music teacher friend Colonel Sellers...

Things aren't quite that bad in the UK, although I find myself "forking out" for books my children need that I wouldn't have to have paid for during my time as a student.

Each State funded school in the UK has a Board of Governors who, along with the Head Teacher decides how the funding from their Local Education Authority is spent. The amount each school receives depends on how many pupils it has and whether additional support is needed for Special Needs Statemented pupils (like my own son). This doesn't always work, but it isn't exactly broken. However, a school that is deemed to be failing may have it's funding controlled directly by the LEA or now, thanks to our Government, privately run, profit-making organisations.

Sorry...I seem to be repeating myself here, so I'll go away.

*Picks up her soap box and wanders off to make a coffee*