Only if you think the public schools exist primarily to provide jobs for teachers' union members does it make any sense to think that the money should stay after the students have gone. Governor Bush has not launched an attack on the public schools. On the contrary, he has said that they can keep their money as long as they produce results. Even when a school is failing to produce good results on its students' tests, it will still get a second chance to improve. But eventually the time comes when it will have to put up or shut up.
Nothing upsets the teachers' unions like being held accountable for results.
They want to hang on to a cushy system where they have iron-clad tenure and automatic raises, whether the students can read or count or do anything else. But the years of huge increases in spending per pupil, beginning in the 1960s, were the very same years when test scores kept going down every year for more than a decade. In other words, the educational system will no longer be able to indulge itself in fads and fetishes that strike its fancy, because there would now be a day of reckoning. Most of us face a day of reckoning every day we go to work. The time is long overdue for the educational establishment to have to do the same.