Ernie the Attorney quoted Philip Greenspun in his blog today, talking about how to “fix” the educational system in America. Now, I enjoy reading Ernie’s blog, and he usually has some good insight, but how anyone could find this statement “brilliant” is beyond me. Greenspun said (of government schools):

“Everyone who works there is either a bureaucrat or a union member. None of these people incurs any kind of pay loss or risk of firing if the kids remain totally ignorant.”

That statement is, for lack of a better word, bullshit. Pure and utter bullshit. I have no doubt that there are teachers in public schools who are coasting. Of course, that never happens in private schools, or at universities with the tenure system, does it? Oh, right, bullshit.
I went to a public school and I could count on one hand the “bureaucrats” who didn’t care if kids were “totally ignorant”. The fact is that I had many talented and dedicated teachers who worked their asses off to make sure we got the best education possible.
In the face of already unmanageable class sizes and dwindling budgets, many of these people sacrificed money from their own pockets or came up with creative ways to stretch pitiful funding even further. I suppose Greenspun thinks those people just became teachers so they could take summers off?
The problem with public education lies in not just a lack of resources, but misguided attempts to qualify education with standardized testing that causes schools to miss the forest for the trees. Teaching to tests sounds good in election sound-bites, and does painfully little to actually educate the populous. The problem is systemic, because we as a society value lower property taxes over increased funding for our schools and because our society seems to somehow equate poverty with stupidity. In fact, the stupidity really emanates from ignorant attitudes like Greenspun’s.
His rhetoric is typical elitist bullshit. Technology is hardly a panacea for a broken system with broken values, and the broken values are typified in comments like that.