The problem is not so much with debt per se, as with what the money is spent on. For example, if a company issues bonds (debt) to built a new factory and produce an in-demand product, they are probably making a rational decision. Similarly, the TVA debt issued during the Roosevelt Administration to build dams and powerplants (some of which is probably still outstanding) has probably generated a good national return. The debt issued to win WWII has also proven to be a good investment, and to the extent debt financing was used for the Interstate Highway System, the GI bill, and the early Internet work at DARPA, we as a society have been amply repaid.

The problem now is that so much of the money being raised by debt is being wasted, with the dysfunctional K-12 education system being example #1. In the private sector, the availability and cheapness of debt led to the excesses in housing, with lots of people buying houses much bigger than they needed because they felt sure that prices would appreciate forever.

Maybe I'm mistaken about the level of federal support, but out where I live K-12 education is funded mostly by state and local taxes collected and disbursed by government entities that do not go into debt (other than capital construction bonds). And our K-12 system is quite functional, thank you very much.

Evening...some of the worst debt issues are at the state & local level. And I'm not sure why capital construction bonds would be excluded from this discussion...if the teaching is not effective, the building is not a useful asset and the debt incurred to build was not productive.

Maybe your K-12 system is functional, but plenty of them are not. See posts on the DC school system, below.

Capital construction is different to the extent that the building itself is an asset. It's roughly the difference between borrowing $100,00 to buy a house and borrowing $100,000 to pay for a vacation. And what would be the point of much of your agenda--firing bad teachers, rewarding good ones, making better use of assessment, etc.--if the end result is to improve teaching without having a building for the improved teachers to teach in?

And of course there are schools and districts that are performing poorly. But to refer to public education per se as "the dysfunctional K-12 education system" is about as accurate as referring to current problems with recruitment, the failure to completely pacify Iraq and Afghanistan, the occasional civilian killings, etc. as "the dysfunctional U.S. military."

Of course the building is an asset that could in theory be sold, but in practice it won't be. If it is being used to house unproductive activities, the money spent on the asset is as unproductive as if it had been spent digging holes in the ground and then filling them up again.

I obviously don't agree with you about the general excellence of the K-12 school system. Undoubtedly there are islands of excellence, but if the overall picture is so great, why are there so many studies that show difficulty in reading documents with any complexity, dealing with quantitative information, knowing the basics of history, etc? Why are the people who administer the system so vehemently opposed to any meaningful measurement and accountability? Why are they so frightened of any form of competition? Why are they so prone to adopting the fad-of-the-week in pedagogy?

What did I ever say about "about the general excellence of the K-12 school system"? I said it was unfair to refer to that system as dysfunctional. There's a difference. Why the straw man?

re your questions:

Why do studies show so many problems? Let me ask you why you so wholly attribute those problems to the education system rather than to the larger social realities within which that system operates? This was part of what I was trying to suggest with my analogy to the U.S. military. No one attributes the failure to complete the Iraq mission in the "matter of weeks" promised by Dick Cheney to the dysfunctionality of our military or the fecklessness of our soldiers. Instead they see decent people doing the best they can under extremely adverse conditions. They don't go around insisting that the military could be working miracles over there if only they'd accept this or that conservative nostrum.

"Why are the people who administer the system so vehemently opposed to any meaningful measurement and accountability?" To any "meaningful measurement and accountability"? I don't recall any opposition to the administration of the California Test of Basic skills back in the day--but that was before "measurement and accountability" got wrapped up in a conservative rhetoric that demonizes teachers.

"Why are they so frightened of any form of competition?" Maybe for the same reasons that businesses are? Anyway, not all of them are opposed. Some of them now administer charter schools.

"Why are they so prone to adopting the fad-of-the-week in pedagogy?" Maybe because of the general consumerist ideology that disposes us to value the "new and improved"? Or maybe for some other reason that doesn't demonize "them"?

Doesn't the fact that we've been saying this since Gerald Ford's time somewhat undercut the direness of the situation?