A simple solution would avert the budget disaster facing California's schools: We should declare every public school to be a prison. The kids would understand.
Details need to be worked out, but I want every child in California to be given a 13-year prison sentence at age 5, with the possibility of a four-year extension.
That way, the $7,000 the state spends per student each year could immediately be raised to $27,000—what the state spends on each inmate annually. And our criminally under-funded schools would qualify for the only category in the governor's proposed budget that's slated to get more money this year.
Via Flutterby [1], “ Raising the Bars Complete sentences: Turning students into prison inmates [2]”
And why not? My old highschool (Coconut Creek High School) [3] looked and felt like a minimum-security facility when I was attending, and now it looks more like your standard prison, what with the concentric rings of fencing around it and what look to be guard towers along the building. Schools are already prisons of a sort, so this is just calling a spade a spade.
[1] http://www.flutterby.com/archives/comments/5860.html
[2] http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/01/19/IN197116.DTL