I've had some excellent teachers over the years. I was always fortunate to have better-than-average schools and good teachers. My classmates were rarely troublemakers or anything like that. Still, even with dedicated teachers, we spent less than 2 hours a day actually productively learning. All the class changes and disruptions made it difficult to get much done. There were also extremely gifted people put in the same classes as extremely slow kids. Either the teachers had to move at a fast pace and leave the slow kids behind, or they had to spend day after day explaining the same concept over and over again. The methods of teaching haven't really improved in the past few hundred years and they are starting to break down as more and more people are crammed into every classroom and as we expect people to go into life with more than a 6th-grade education.

I was lucky, however: on a good day in some of the classes in my highschool, no learning took place. On a bad day people were having knife fights, throwing marble bricks at eachother, or just brawling on a bad day. I was jumped one time during school by a group of black thugs who just wanted to get back at "whitey." They hit me, and about 10 other people, from behind with a 40 lb. backpack. I was knocked unconcious and had one of my teeth badly chipped. The next week, they were all back in class.

I would say 1/3 of the people in my school got my caliber of education, which is to say halfway decent. The rest got nothing at all, except daycare and an easy way to meet drug dealers. How are we going to clean up our schools and get rid of all the people who don't want to be there? Even after we do that, will things really improve? There are a bunch of sorry teachers out there, but even with excellent ones and good students, it is difficult to overcome the system. And I don't think the Republican's genius proposal for standardized testing is going to do squat. All it is going to do is encourage teaching to the test. The system is already flawed and they are only going to make it more entrenched instead of giving teachers the freedom they need to actually teach.

-Biscuits