Afghaninstan General Stanley McChrystal

This one chart is damning of our entire public education system and ought to be reason enough to disband all teachers' unions.

It shows the average cost to educate a kid from kindergarten through 12th grade in inflation-adjusted 2009 dollars. In 1970 each child's education cost about $40,000. Today it's nearly $160,000 - nearly four times as much! And if you look at the test scores over that period, they haven't budged at all. So we're paying 4 times as much in constant dollars and getting jack shit for it. In even a poorly run company that would be enough to get people fired and auditors looking for criminal fraud.

And it's not like children's brains are fundamentally different now or there's a lot more material to learn - basic math is still basic math and reading is still reading. Which means that teaching might be the only profession in the world that has become less efficient over the last four decades.

And if you're wondering where all the money went, well this little tidbit will give you a clue: former Niles Township, IL school superintendent Neil Codell will receive $26 million dollars in retirement checks from the Illinois teacher pension plan which he will qualify for after just 34 years of work. Which means he'll be getting nearly a $1 million dollars a year in his pension. Now multiply that by every school district and you start to see why some states are facing bankruptcy.

So the next time there's a new ballot initiative to increase educational spending to "help the children", remember this chart and vote no. And don't feel a shred of guilt about it. Because the only people who are going to suffer are the Neil Codells of the world.

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Kliphnote: I find it interesting that some people will not read this blog because it doesn't

lick the boots of Obama and his bunch on incompetent morons.

But they will read aljazeera.net.

I do remember.