Stephen Beale’s GoLocalProv article, today, on the state’s disbursement of federal Race to the Top funds to contractors, on the one hand, and local districts, on the other, pretty well captures the establishment thinking on education.  It’s the technocrats at the state level, who want to build a “durable infrastructure” (in the phrase of policy wonks), versus mainly the teachers’ unions, which want more of the money to flow down to their members.

When the funding was initially announced, Education Commissioner Deborah Gist said the money “will give us the opportunity to engage more educators across the state and give them the support, tools, and resources they need,” according to an August 25, 2010 news report in the Providence Journal.

“That could not be any further from the reality that I, as a teacher, have seen on the ground,” said state Sen. James Sheehan, a North Kingstown Democrat who is a history teacher at Toll Gate High School in Warwick.

Sheehan said it reminds him of the trickle-down theory of economics. “I haven’t even felt a raindrop of that here below at the teacher level,” he said.

What might that trickle accomplish?  Anyone?  Anyone?

According to a chart by Cato’s Andrew Coulson that Deroy Murdock posted on National Review Online, not a whole lot:

What you’re looking at is unabated growth in the cost of American public education, with continual expansion of its workforce, and with absolutely no appreciable results.  None.

Before we give in to our little spats about who’s got a big enough bucket to catch the federal freebees as they flow by, we should perhaps question why we’re so focused on money.  And perhaps we should wonder whether it wouldn’t be better for the well-being and, ultimately, education of American children to let their families keep more of what they earn and individually direct resources where they will do the most good for them and their communities.

The biggest question, however, may be why we remain so disengaged that we tolerate the same old voices offering the same old excuses and same old rationales as generation after generation of our children are cheated out of an adequate education — and now cheated out of the opportunity to come of age during a vibrant economy.