By what measure? How much we spend on them? How well they perform on nationally administered tests like the ACT? Where does Nevada rank by that measure? Or New Hampshire?

Teacher raises have not been commensurate with the rate of increase in school spending, not even close. That's not a Knox County or Tennessee or even a Southern phenomenon. It's national. Compared against their peers - even in the public sector - with similar levels of education, teachers are woefully underpaid. Teacher to student ratios have only been slightly reduced - while student popuation has remained fairly stagnant to declining for the past few decades - so we aren't hiring lots and lots of new teachers, either. From 1965 to 2002 (the last year for which I have any data), the student-teacher ratio has fallen from 1/25 to 1/20. So where does the money go? We're not giving more of it to our teachers or hiring more and more of them. So it sure isn't going where it ought to go.

The United States spends more per student than any other developed nation and has for most of the past quarter century. In 2002 dollars, per student expenditures have risen from $3500/student in 1965 to $9000/student in 2002, both figures expressed in $2002 dollars. Btw, these are national numbers, not Tennessee numbers.

See the data here: (link...)

I have lots of questions about these numbers, some of which I'll list below, but it seems pretty clear that whatever our problems are in education, lack of overall funding isn't the root cause. Questions:

1. Is (are) there some sort of bureaucratic black hole(s) down which all our money is disappearing? Pumping more water into a badly leaking hose doesn't do much to increase the pressure in the nozzle.

2 Have our methods of teaching students become obsolete? Or conversely, have our new teaching methods proven less effective than older ones? Money doesn't fix a broken process.

3. Is there some sort of societal shift that makes it much more difficult to teach students today (today being a relative term since I heard these same complaints about our US education system when I was still in school - and I'm 42). You can't buy better parents or a better culture.

4. Are we looking at the data incorrectly? Is the data being carefully presented to follow a predetermined script? In other words, is it possible our education system isn't declining when compared either against itself or against other nations? This would imply we're spending more and more on something that isn't really broken.

5. Are we teaching our students the wrong material? Have we eaten up so much of our limited educational time on "social" lessons that we don't have time enough to teach the core curricula? That's a favorite accusation of the political right and not in keeping with my own educational experience or what I've observed with my 2nd grade daughter... but anecdotal data isn't sufficient to completely discount it. If true, then more money doesn't buy more time.

Whatever the underlying causes are - and I desperately want to know what those may be - the issue isn't one of being miserly with our education dollars.