Thanks to Craig for his link to Stossel's program. I watched it last Friday sitting in my massage chair.

If you needed more evidence on where to send your kids, there is this story from CNN.com today. For a fee and to maintain their teaching licenses, some Miami-Dade teachers paid to get credit for courses they never took. The scammer "pleaded guilty to fraud in November, admitting he did little more than sell transcripts, requiring no tests, homework or other academic work." Hmm, some of my students put in the same amount of effort.

But this was the best:

On Wednesday, dozens of students and parents defended the teachers who lost their jobs, saying that removing them in the middle of the school year would be too disruptive. Board member Evelyn Greer, who voted against the firings, agreed. "It baffles me, just baffles me, to have disruptions at the class level," Greer said.

So you would rather your child, or the children in your district, be taught by a fraud? Aside from teachers' unions, government monopolies, and poor teachers' colleges, part of the problem with public schools (and the reason why I transferred to a Catholic high school my junior year) are the fellow students, their parents, teachers, and administrators more interested in pep rallies than college prep.