If you can read this, don't thank a teacher, thank a million years of brain evolution. Reading happens with ease — illiterate adults can and did learn quite quickly. Arithmetic too can be learned at 5 or 50. Schools take note. Both are easily accelerated, but the current push to do these activities before a child is ready can be permanently damaging. Note too — this is not the case with small muscle movement. From finger-painting and writing to tying shoes and handling small objects, the kindergarten activities and the arts and crafts follow-ups in later years are essential — usually long before our teen years. If the brain/spine isn't trained early, it often can't happen at all. When it comes to paring down and shifting emphasis to preparing for "The Tests", it is important to keep this in mind.

The argument that the cost burden should be shifted from a property tax to statewide funding is valid, perhaps essential. But the states are going broke too. Some may, sometime soon, actually have to declare bankruptcy to, among other things, unburden the taxpayers from employment contract obligations that cannot be met. And the federal government? It is only massive and temporary assistance that has forestalled tens of thousands of teacher layoffs. This infusion of money — over $50 billion nationally with over $2 billion to New York, can not be sustained and has only blinded school boards to the need to for cut back drastically.

A few problems:

Teacher layoffs, always a sad thing, are viewed by some as the ultimate "solution". Under our current system, it is a very bad one, as the most recent hires are usually the lowest paid, so we must fire more of them to make a budget impact.

School boards are populated disproportionately by teachers both active and retired. This is a conflict of interest that should be viewed with alarm in much the same way that we worry about ex-congressmen being employed as lobbyists by corporations. Both practices subvert the public interest.

Teachers may not be as smart as we would like. At least, on average, they are not good academic performers. The level is higher than a decade or two ago. Still the SAT scores of teachers are well below the average for all college graduates. Yet collectively, they present themselves as, and we believe them to be, experts. We allow them to determine the broad and narrow areas of most curriculum specifications and testing. This control is a prescription for mediocrity.

It makes no sense to march the teachers off to the guillotine. Our problems are of our own and our government's making. We need to reclaim the schools' primary function which is the education of the next generations not sinecures for the employees. We need to eliminate federal testing mandates and state curriculum mandates. They're bleeding us dry and not serving the children. If big government wants to help, they could provide the structure and funding for a huge-menu, online curriculum that each student, together with parents and teachers, could individually tailor.

When times get tough contracts have to be revised. State law too. The angry citizenry know this instinctively. The partisans sense it as well. Parents and whole communities should relish the opportunities to provide far superior education at far less cost.

Bob Prener is Professor of Mathematics, emeritus, at Long Island University. He has spent the last 20 years of his employment teaching and directing graduate programs in Elementary and Secondary Education in Rockland, Westchester and the mid-Hudson. He bears the guilt that the degrees and credits earned in his many courses represent a burden of the order of $100 million to the taxpayers of northern New Jersey and Rockland County. He hopes that his teacher-students have been prepared and motivated to make themselves worth the money.