I think that it’s rather ass backwards, frankly.  The focuses that are set for education spending are understandable but excessive with all focus put upon the sciences for subjects to be invested in and then sports being where most of the spending often goes.  The cutting of funding to most art and humanity programs to some extent doesn’t help either.

Testing has become such a priority to maintain funding that students  are shovel fed information solely for the sake of regurgitating it on a standardized test that tells nothing about how much they’ve actually learned and can apply.  All that it does is cause stress to the students, and the teachers, because the pressure is placed upon them to keep an establishment afloat that they are made to hate.

That teachers are made to divert from what they may consider the best way to teach students, to fulfill their dreams and passions, in order to produce the best results at the expense of what’s best for their charges angers me.

I think that the amount of homework that has become average and expected is obscene, especially since the best school systems in the word tend to not use homework much if at all and there is no evidence that it is beneficial to anything.  

I think that the reduction of recess and increase in security is also really harmful to the student experience, though those stem from other problems that also need to be addressed.  Desperately.

I blame Bush for the most part, and I’m really glad that the worst of it has been addressed in part under Obama, not as much as I’d like but it’s still a start.