I have no idea what the editors are talking about

In an odd, rambling (yeah, yeah, who am I to complain about rambling), and eventually pointless editorial today, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel describes but doesn't endorse a massive school spending program in Massachusetts:

The purse strings have been tight in education this decade in Wisconsin and elsewhere, and retrenchment has been the rule. Even as schools have striven to boost academic achievement, budget woes have driven them to scuttle such "frills" as art, music, driver's ed and library service.

That's why a costly, ambitious education plan that crossed our desk (or, rather, our computer screen) from another state the other day caught our eye. Republican Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts is proposing to give every middle and high school student in the state a laptop computer. He would also add 1,000 new math and science teachers and give the state's best teachers $5,000 bonuses. The tab for the plan: $46 million next year, $143 million the year thereafter.

Romney's plan holds lessons for industrial states like Wisconsin, which is trying to make a transition to a knowledge economy. Massachusetts is a leader in the knowledge revolution, and the governor is taking steps to ensure that it remains in the vanguard. [. . .]

Massachusetts boasts more personal wealth than does Wisconsin in part because the knowledge economy is so robust there. The trick now is to better invigorate that economy in Wisconsin--a goal that entails stepping up the investment in education, whence much of knowledge hails.

We don't necessarily endorse the specifics of Romney's plan, but its expansiveness against a backdrop of austerity is worth pondering.

I'm sure that J-Dizzle is pleased with the ego-stroking, but I have a hard time understanding why they wasted the editorial space on a program that "caught their eye", especially when the program is utterly unfeasible in Wisconsin.

Worse, though, this editorial plays into the hands of those whom Jim Horn warns us against:

Now, fifteen years later and well advanced into an era of testing hysteria that has left America’s children and parents edgy and anxious and our educators demoralized and exhausted, comes another education summit in February 2005, again in Virginia, and this time with the world’s top technocrat, Bill Gates, delivering the keynote. In the sights of the test-based reformers now is the American high school, as flabby it would seem as America’s school children and totally unprepared to insure the continuance of America’s economic predominance in the world. The high schools are so bad, it would seem, that students are leaving in droves, creating an embarrassing dropout rate for the world’s bastion of equal opportunity and economic success.

Those that are not leaving, according to the now-familiar narrative, are entering college without the basics that will assure their success in the high-tech jobs of the future. These students are so unprepared, says the familiar refrain, that corporations are looking to other countries to fill the need. Not mentioned is the fact that those high-tech and low-tech jobs are being funneled offshore into foreign job markets by people like Mr. Gates and the other CEOs at the Virginia summit who are unwilling to pay American workers a fair wage.

Horn's full essay--which I linked to a few weeks ago, so I know you read it--is a near-complete history of how technocrats have blamed schools for failures in America's business acumen over the last century. Mitt Romney and Bill Gates are the latest in that line, hoping to turn schools into training grounds for private enterprise rather than places for students to become actual human beings. They overlook failures in America's business model to instead blame me teachers.

The editors don't go that far (though they are about due for a teacher-blaming editorial), choosing instead to leave an open-ended question about the inadequacy of Wisconsin's schools to prepare students for the "information economy." Their solution--be more like Massachusetts?--is incomprehensible.