By Steve Sailer
12/19/2013
From my new column in Taki’s Magazine:
During the Vietnam War, a famous protest bumper sticker read:
It will be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber.
But these days, spending on quick fixes for education is approaching levels similar to the military-industrial complex. For example, Los Angeles school superintendent John Deasy plans to pay Apple a billion dollars to furnish every student with an iPad and software (some of which hasn’t gone through the formality of existing yet).
While the Air Force’s notoriously expensive B-2 Stealth Bomber program cost $45 billion from 1979 to 2004, the LAUSD iPad rollout, if scaled up to the entire country, would total about $75 billion.
That’s a lot of Rice Krispies Treats.
A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon we ought to be talking about real management. Unfortunately, the education industry approaches aerospace-sized projects with more starry-eyed optimism than is prudent for a bake sale, much less a war.
Read the whole thing there to see what lessons we can learn for education reform management from a successful military innovation: the invention of stealth technology.
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