Education Matters:

Our state’s financial woes invite two obvious questions from us Californians, neither of which have easy answers: How did we get into this mess, and how do we get out of it?

I’m inclined to believe that it is not in the hands of politicians and bureaucrats, but rather a job for we the people. If lawmakers are serious about trimming our state’s budget, they need to start turning a deaf ear to all the bureaucrats, lobbyists, program administrators and special interests (including unions) — all of which have interests to protect, programs to preserve and pet projects to advance — and start listening to the people of this state.

As one of those people who has a bird’s-eye view of government extravagance/waste, let me offer just a few examples, two of which I have mentioned previously in this column, but now I present in a package, each telling the same story of distant management and out-of-touch policymakers.

When placed side by side, they tell a more disturbing story of educational theories and gurus reaching into the deep pockets of state allocations for education and forging a permanent drain on the state’s economy. Each was, at one time, well intentioned, but in these hard times, where actual jobs are in jeopardy, where the education of our children is compromised, and where California’s deficit smacks us all in the face, we might want to rethink how we spend our educational dollars.

If costs to the taxpayers are added up for just the following three educational programs, the figure would be in the hundreds of millions of dollars each year. In my opinion, all three are complete, utter, absolute, unconditional (Am I clear here?) wastes of the public’s tax dollars.

So let me reel off these three, which represent only a fraction of misspent state money, and do forgive me if any of this sounds repetitious, but these are programs whose existence is prolonged not by their efficacy, but by their bloated size and their firm hold on the public’s purse. Like barnacles that grow bigger each year on the underside of a ship, ultimately making that ship un-seaworthy, our ship of state, California, needs to be put into dry dock for a thorough scraping away of all the junk that passes for governance.