Perhaps you wonder why this lesson hasn't been learned in Congress, or why every politician west of the Bering Straits totally ignored the earthquake admissions of failure. Yes, the report was issued a day before the State of the Union Address and in the middle of an impeachment trial. Yes, it was just a follow-up to conclusions suggested two years ago in an earlier review. But that's not the reason why it was ignored. In the kindest possible terms, failure is irrelevant to politics.
Politicians respond to emotional pleas to fix every real and imagined problem.
When confronted with such demands, political expedience searches for a vehicle, a group of politically powerful people who can be delegated to deal with the problem and hand them vast sums of money to create the illusion, the appearance of doing something, of doing anything. In the case of education, the delegates are teachers. Or, more accurately, the teacher's unions. Or, more precisely, the elite teacher organizers in the Department of Education. Education Title I will be renewed by Congress later this year.