Hey buddy, educate this.

I've just finished a column by conservative William McKenzie of the Dallas Morning News, and apparently this is what passes for serious analysis when right-wingers deal with education issues:

McKenzie says that since public education is the big ticket item in state budgets, the expense of educating children will need to be reduced to avoid any tax increases. McKenzie has done some checking and has decided the solution is to do away with restrictions on class size, meaning that Texas can get away with hiring fewer teachers. Hell, if class sizes were doubled, we could theoretically reduce faculties by fifty percent !

Since almost everyone agrees that smaller classes are conducive to learning, McKenzie says we need to offset the larger classes by only hiring master teachers. You know, the kind of teachers who inspire movies like "Mr. Holland's Opus" and "To Sir With Love."

To make sure only unusually gifted mentors are in charge of those larger classrooms, school districts will need to cull out the average ones by changing the way teachers are evaluated and compensated.

I taught school for one year and if a few things had worked out differently when I was younger, I probably would have made public education my life's work, either as a classroom teacher or a guidance counselor. As it is, I married a career teacher and have a daughter who wants to be one, so the state of things in Texas schools is a topic that interests me.

The problem I have with McKenzie's recommendation is this: School teachers in Texas are already among the lowest-paid professionals. If class sizes are increased, so are the workloads of individual teachers. After all, somebody has to grade all that homework and all those tests, and do all the paperwork the bureaucracy mandates for each student. Does a hack newspaper writer like William McKenzie seriously believe that first-rate teachers, those who function at the highest level of skill mastery, are going to bear the burden of substantially-increased workloads without substantially-increased salaries to make it worthwhile ? My experience as a manager was that I was constantly required to deal with high turnover among my best employees. The best workers were always in demand and could easily move across fences into greener pastures. Average workers who were merely competent would be with me forever.

Bottom line: Anyone who says the solution to the budget crisis is to increase class size, decrease faculty size, and retain only teachers with superior ability is either a fucking idiot or a fucking liar.

Conservative Republicans oppose the whole concept of public education. They believe that like wars and most other things, education should be privatized. They love the idea of using taxpayer dollars to subsidize vouchers for private religious schools, where praying's legal and they don't have to mess with all those government regulations. If Texans really cared about preserving and improving public education, they wouldn't keep electing conservative Republicans to run things.