1. we have been raising educational spending for 50 years, and the results get worse. There is little to no correlation between the highest spending districts and those that show the best results. All of the additional money seems to get siphoned off by increased administration and less ends up in classrooms. The number one variable in explaining the difference between achieving and non-achieving students is the quality of the teacher in the classroom. The current tenure and union lock-in of public education virtually guarantees that raising teacher salaries means that the bad teachers get paid more without getting replaced by better teachers.
2. The legislative plan is different than the replacement plan. The thinking is that putting the current system on a shorter replacement schedule makes it less likely that we'll be put into a stopgap mode by going into permadebate, as in budget and spending authorizations.
3. Einstein made predictions that could and were measured experimentally. His theories were extended from first principles. It was when he tried to fit his theory to a static universe, the consensus of the time, that he screwed up with the cosmological constant. It was Hubble, working from actual data, who explained why the red shift numbers worked out the way they did. The AGW models, to the extent that measurements can be made, do not agree with observations, so they keep adding epicycles and fudge factors to make them match the data, and modifying the data based on the results of the models. |
