Definition of Insanity -- at the Educational Level

Insanity -- doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

Like a teacher walking into a classroom every morning, assuming that today the students will be well-behaved and cooperative, when they never had any incentive to start, so why should they now?

Like taking a group of students through the same curriculum, hoping that the same staid, pre-packaged ideas will spark the interest of at least one student.

Like school districts who continue to misappropriate taxpayer funds without facing any serious oversight, yet local communities continue to complain about waste and fraud.

Like teachers and students who go back and forth discussing dead ideas or fighting age-old wars between those who do not want to learn -- from another as directive -- to those who are hired to teach -- by directive.

How about that repeated refrain for "Reform! Reform! Reform!"? An empty slogan oft-repeated, from LA Unified to the Bay Cities. Every step towards decentralizing the monolithic school district top-down creates fewer hierarchical offices, but more lateral employment. All these chiefs, and the Indians and their young ones are starving.

"Let's keep spending! We need more money, not less." Yet per pupil spending has increased, with no correlational increase in test scores across the country for years at a time.

These and other tried and untrue liberal myths have sprung, like full-grown Minerva from the head of Zeus, on the assumption of "This Should Work."

So, if the federal stimulus did not stimulate the economy or the school system, what is needed is more money.

If teachers are dissatisfied with their jobs, in part because of the onerous paperwork that has nothing to do with educating people, let's give them more paperwork and have them attend more frivolous seminars so that they can learn to cope (but not escape) the bureaucratic (not so) merry-go-round of public education.

Don't like standardized tests? Schools will block off an entire month so that teachers can endure them for a longer period of time, foolishly assuming that it is the rush of testing, rather than the testing itself, that is the cause of teacher tremors.

Like the proverbial hammer ever-searched for, never-found, yet sure to be discovered, teachers, school districts, and educational administrators across the country will keep doing what does not work because they are comforted by the wicked notion that, someday, somehow, all of this nonsense "should work."

I say, in the words of the bald-lady dieter: "Stop the Insanity!"