Thirdly, you post a link to a Heritage Foundation site quoting Bill Bennet, of all people, yet you have the temerity to suggest that I lack balance because I quote RAND ( a notoriously left-wing lobby. Anyway, the link argues that because reading scores were basically flat while total education spending more than doubled over a period of thirty years, education spending is therefore necessarily a 'black hole'. However, the situation is not that simple. Firstly, the figures quoted do not take account of inflation. They should be adjusted to 1970s dollars. Secondly, I am not saying that we should simply throw money at the problem. I am pointing out that there are many other factors to consider than supposedly powerful unions which protect legions of incompetent teachers which is the sole explanation in your accounts.
Fourthly, you have yet to cite a single fact to support your central claims: 1) that American students are behind those in the rest of the industrialized world 2) that this, if true, is caused by the-supposedly- relatively strong bargaining power of American teachers' unions in comparison with other industrialized countries. You have made these specific claims repeatedly without the slightest scrap of evidence.