The Obamessiah is calling for hiring 10,000 more teachers in order to bolster math and science grades in school. Of course this doesn’t actually add up as pointed out over at Random Nuclear Strikes. Take a look at some charts.
The first chart shows the number of public school employees versus the number of students enrolled since 1970. Notice something odd there? The second chart is an adjusted for inflation (thanks Federal Reserve) display of the cost of K-12 public education versus the percentage change in achievements of 17 year-old students. Once again something is amiss there.
It seems simply throwing money at the problem isn’t helping. I know our current administration believes strongly that if something isn’t working you just have to do it again only harder but that doesn’t actually work. And interesting book I’m reading through right now (which is available for free in PDF form) is The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America. The book goes through the history of education in America and indicates our country’s problems in academia seems to stem back to the turn of the century. The main issue is our country’s education system used to cherish education for education’s sake, now we do workforce training and teach kids to do as they’re told because they’re told to do so.