I have…
“crackpot theories”
“do your best impression of a man”
“as well as Rainman understands the baseball score”
“pissing on yourself”
“trolling around a major metropolitan area with a sandwich board”
“just get religion or something”
“go for the balls and pretend he’s being strong”
“impossible to have an intelligent debate”

Delightful. But I’m afraid these aren’t arguments but schoolyard taunts. And how you can say that I have no “understanding of statistics” from a blog comment that included a single stat (if I were writing an article on education reform, I suspect would provide broader context), is totally beyond me. One can only assume that you are, in fact, a statistician…or a exceedingly pompous copy writer. But dismissive proclamations about those loony, fundamentalist libertarians doesn’t make one well-informed. Arguments do.

If you so desire, you can visit the Spectator (www.spectator.se) and prove everyone wrong by telling them that are crazy and are in danger of peeing themselves.

As for us vs. them, I believe you were the one who started in on Pye’s “lefty friends.”

At any rate, everyone else except for us has moved on to other postings, and I, at least, have a job to do. So when I bow out of this conversation, I’ll trust you to do your best impression of a man and not take it as my agreeing to any of your crackpot theories.

Urgh. I thank Michael Moore, university professors and talk radio (yes, of BOTH persuasions) for lowing the level of political discourse in America to this “us versus them” business.

So…if money is the problem, we simply pay teachers more, buy fancy computers for, say, Mattapan (in an underperforming district), and the problem is solved, right? Well, not exactly. The problem is that we HAVE done all of these things…American teachers ARE paid well (some of the highest salaries in the world, in fact) but—and here is the problem—many of them don’t know how to teach and, thanks to the unions, we cannot fire them. Think of the X/Y axis here: spending on education has increased drastically and test scores have fallen (so much so, in fact, that SAT scores are now inflated into meaninglessness). So what gives? Surely throwing money at public schools isn’t the answer to such a complicated problem.

PS: Your not-so-subtle suggestion that I am one of those right-wing hatchet men (who reads the Drudge Report!!!) and that my “beloved” Sweden a “communist” country (democratic socialism, to be precise) seem to be at odds with one another.

But back to your question of Sweden vs. the U.S. in terms of test scores, money spent, salaries, etc. I haven’t seen the same figures as you have, but assuming you didn’t do your research on the Drudge Report, I’d venture a guess that the discrepancies have a lot to do with the fact that we have a wider range of economic classes in the U.S. When those statistics are compiled, my test scores at my snooty little suburban public school in Massachusetts are figured in with those from inner city schools in say, Compton. Probably not the case in your beloved — and nearly Communist, speaking of Pinko — Sweden.

Jennie