Let’s face it: everyone is trying to make a profit. There’s nothing wrong with that—it’s normal, with people doing things because they feel they’ll make them better off. The problem starts when you insist that you’re a saint—that you’re somehow far more selfless than most other people—and you just can’t keep up the charade any longer. Welcome to the Democratic Party’s teacher union problem.

It seems that trying to keep the party’s union-heavy base happy while simultaneously appearing unbeholden to entrenched interests is going to be a tricky balancing act for the Democrats. But dealing with teachers unions—which adding the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers together have about 4.7 million members—is going to be particularly treacherous. Educators are by far the biggest unionized bloc, and almost certainly the most troublesome. Indeed, as the Los Angeles Times reports today, Democrats are particularly rent asunder on education issues, and a new movie about a parent taking on the union to turn a bad public school into a charter school—the so-called parent trigger—is driving another wedge.

The movie, Won’t Back Down, has already been panned by AFT president Randi Weingarten. But at least her union—unlike the larger and more obstinate National Education Association—acknowledges that there are education problems, and maybe the unions’ time-honored demand of “more money and no accountability” has had something to do with them.

“We bear a lot of responsibility for this,” Weingarten recently told the New York Times. “We were focused—as unions are—on fairness and not as much on quality.”

No doubt part of the reason that at least the AFT is accepting a little blame is that it sees that teachers unions are losing the sympathies of many members of the public. People are seemingly growing tired of seeing unionized educators enjoying good incomes and expensive perks while those paying the taxes struggle and test scores languish.

The problem with the union reinvention—at least as captured by the Weingarten quote—is that it probably strikes many people as hollow. Why? Because they know that unions are run by normal people and represent normal people, and what they want first and foremost is not what’s best for kids or “fairness,” but getting as good a deal for themselves as possible. In other words, they are starting to see through unions’ selfless-angels facade—the public relations sham of people just wanting a living wage while they give the mythical 110 percent “for the kids” —and are glimpsing normal, profit-seeking human beings who have had a fairly cushy deal over the decades.

Teachers unions, as those of us at Cato’s Center for Educational Freedom have said, are not the root problem in education, nor are they or the people they represent any more evil or good than most other people. The root educational problem is that public schools are government schools, and politics—which cannot be detached from government—rewards concentrated special interests, of which unionized teachers are among the biggest.

For the Democratic Party, the big problem is that for decades the teachers unions have insisted that they and their members as far more noble than almost anyone else. At least, more noble than anyone openly seeking a profit, which is most people. But the public is catching on: teachers and their unions are just as self-interested as most other people, and government-run schooling has enabled them to get some awfully nice, taxpayer-funded deals. So what do you do? Acknowledge the paper-mache wings have fallen off and risk the wrath of the teacher unionists, or keep up the angelic charade and hope the public stops noticing reality? Neither is a happy prospect for the Democratic Party.

If you wanted a liberal arts education in 1499, you were probably out of luck. But, if you happened to be a 0.01 percenter, you might have been able to saddle up the horse and ride to Oxford or Cambridge. Because that’s where the books were. Books didn’t generally come to you, you had to go to them.

Today, every one of us has more works of art, philosophy, literature, and history at our fingertips than existed, worldwide, half-a-millennium ago. We can call them up, free or for a nominal charge, on electronic gadgets that cost little to own and operate. Despite that fact, we’re still captives to the idea that a liberal arts education must be dispensed by colleges and must be acquired between the ages of 19 and 22.

But the liberal arts can be studied without granite buildings, frat houses, or sports venues. Discussions about great works of literature can be held just as easily in coffee shops as in stadium-riser classrooms—perhaps more easily. Nor is there any reason to believe that there is some great advantage to concentrating the study of those works in the few years immediately after high school—or that our study of them must engage us full-time. The traditional association of liberal arts education and four-year colleges was already becoming an anachronism before the rise of the World Wide Web. It is now a crumbling fossil.

Handing colleges tens of thousands of dollars—worse yet, hundreds of thousands—for an education that can be obtained independently at little cost, would be tragically wasteful even if the college education were effective. In many cases, it is not. Research by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa reveals that almost half of all college students make no significant gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning, or written communication after two full years of study. Those are skills that any liberal arts education should cultivate. Even among the subset of students who linger for four years at college, fully one-third make no significant gains in those areas.

And yet, instead of recognizing the incredible democratization of access to the liberal arts that modern technology has permitted, and the consequent moribundity of this role of colleges, public policy remains mired in a medieval conception of higher education. Politicians compete to promise what they think young people want to hear: more and larger subsidies for college fees. Even if perpetuating a 15th century approach to higher education were in students’ interests—which it clearly is not—increased government subsidies for college tuition would not achieve that goal. We have tripled student aid in real, inflation-adjusted dollars since 1980, to roughly $14,000 per student, and yet student debt recently hit an all-time high of roughly $1 trillion. And barely half of students at four-year public colleges even complete their studies in six years. Aid to colleges is good for colleges, but it is an outlandish waste of resources if the goal is to improve the educational options available to young people.

These same realities apply, to an only slightly lesser extent, to the sciences and engineering. In those areas, colleges sometimes have equipment and facilities of instructional value that students could not independently afford. But even in the sciences and engineering, such cases are limited. It is perfectly feasible for an avid computer geek to learn everything he or she needs to know to work in software engineering by doing individual and group projects with inexpensive consumer hardware and software. This was even possible before the rise of the Web. My first direct supervisor at Microsoft was a brilliant software architect hired right out of high school… in the 1980s.

Though most politicians have been slow on the uptake, the public seems increasingly aware of all this. A Pew Research survey finds that 57 percent Americans no longer think college is worth the money. So why are they still sending their kids there? Habit is no doubt part of the picture, but so is signaling. People realize that colleges are instructionally inefficient, but being accepted to and graduating from an academically selective one signals ability and assiduity to potential employers.

So what’s the solution? Alternative signaling options and better hiring practices would be a good start. Anyone who studies hard for the SAT, ACT, GRE, or the like, and scores well, can send the academic ability signal. But in the end, employers want more than academic ability. What they really want are subject area expertise, a good work ethic, an ability to work smoothly with a variety of people, and, for management, leadership ability. Any institution that develops good metrics for these attributes, and issues certifications accordingly, will provide an incredibly valuable service for employers. Students would then be free to study independently, occasionally paying for instruction where necessary, and then seek a certification signaling what they’ve learned. In the meantime, job candidates can create a portfolio of work on the Web showing what they know and can do (a “savoir faire”)—which would be more useful to employers than most resumes.

What is certainly not useful is raising taxes still further in a time of economic difficulty in order to pad the budgets of colleges and encourage students to take on yet more college debt.

Is it possible for charter schools to increase educational options and diversity in the public school system but decrease it overall; to spend less money than regular public schools but cost taxpayers more overall; and to outperform regular public schools but decrease achievement overall?

Unfortunately, it is possible, and this mix of intended and unintended outcomes is the “Charter School Paradox.” But it is only a paradox if we take a narrow view of charter school effects. Rigorous new research concludes that public charter schools are seriously damaging the private education market, adding to the taxpayer burden, and undermining private options for families and healthy competition in the education sector.

Fortunately, we have a solution in education tax credits …

Take a look at the full paper by Richard Buddin, my short companion piece, and our brief video on the findings and implications of this path-breaking new research.

Over the weekend, the White House released a “new” report explaining why President Obama thinks the Feds need to spend — er, “invest” — $25 billion on public school staffing. Since July 2009 “the economy lost over 300,000 local education jobs.”

Where have we heard this before?

Of course! We’ve been down this road many times, and the President did get a tidy $10 billion bailout on top of the original “stimulus” — with its roughly $100 billion for education – as a result. Why not try again?

For the same reason he should never have tried: While no one likes to see someone lose a job, the fact of the matter is we’ve seen decades of public-school hiring and spending binges, ultimately without even close to commensurate achievement gains to show for them. Between 1969–70 and Fall 2009 pupil-to-staff ratios dropped from 13.6‑to‑1 to 7.8‑to‑1 — a huge staffing increase. Pupil-to-teacher ratios dropped from 22.6‑to‑1 to 15.4‑to‑1. Meanwhile, National Assessment of Educational Progress scores for 17-year-olds — our schools “final products” — were almost completely stagnant. And that 300,000 figure? It seems like a lot, but in 2010 there were almost 6.2 million local, public K‑12 employees. That’s a less than 5 percent trimming.

In addition to the dearth of evidence that more hiring will do appreciable good, there are two other big problems. The first is that $25 billion is a lot of money that we simply don’t have. Anyone notice the national debt is about to surpass $16 trillion? And the second: The federal government has no constitutional authority to waste our dough in the name of education.

Frankly, this bailout idea is really stale, and we at Cato’s Center for Educational Freedom are getting a little tired of ripping it to shreds. But as long as people continue to believe that public schools have no money, and that someone else (hint: “the rich”) will pay the bills, we’ll constantly be offered such reality-be-darned proposals.

Polls are tricky things, giving a veneer of scientific certainty to an endeavor subject to all sorts of biases, methodological problems, etc. Worse, while they might tell us what people think, they do almost nothing to inform us about what policies actually make the most sense. With those provisos in mind — and they apply heavily here — what follows are the highlights of the annual Phi Delta Kappa/​Gallup poll on public education, released this morning. Phi Delta Kappa, by the way, is the self-described “premier professional association for educators.”

I’m not going to hit all the topics — you can catch every question here – I’m just going to cover the ones likely of most interest to libertarian types. And here they are:

School choice: Using PDK/​Gallup’s long favored voucher question — the most loaded one, which asks whether respondents favor or oppose allowing people to “choose a private school at public expense” — 44 percent favored and 55 percent opposed. For whatever reason — maybe seeing choice greatly expand recently, maybe growing disgust with teachers unions — favorability rose from 34 percent last year. Charter schools were favored by 66 percent of respondents, and “laws that allow parents to petition to remove the leadership and staff of failing schools” — roughly, “parent trigger” laws — were favored by 70 of respondents. This last one is probably the worst way to deliver “choice,” but it must sound good. And how did the best way to deliver choice — tax credits — do? The pollsters didn’t even ask about them, probably because they would have polled very well.

National Standards: Asked several questions about their thoughts on the likely effect of “common core standards” — but not the Common Core standards — most people thought having some commonality would be beneficial. But there seems to be a huge disconnect between the question and reality: only 2 to 4 percent of respondents answered “don’t know” or refused to respond to the common core questions, but 60 percent of voters polled just a few months ago said they knew nothing about the actual Common Core standards being implemented in almost every state. So people seem to like generic commonality, but know little about the actual standards that were, unfortunately, purposely kept under the radar by their supporters.

Biggest Problem Facing Schools: Surprise, surprise, by far the most cited “biggest problem” people said their public schools were facing was “lack of financial support.” 35 percent picked that, versus 8 percent fingering “lack of discipline,” the next biggest vote-getter. What this likely tell us is that (1) we are very slowly coming out of a recessionary period and some districts probably are making some cuts, and (2) people have no idea how much is actually spent on education, or how much it has grown over the decades. It also shows that propaganda — when you hear people say “the schools are underfunded” enough you believe it — works.

Grading Public Schools: As always, people gave their local public schools decent grades and public schools overall lousy ones. This year 48 percent of respondents gave their own public schools an A or B (though that means a majority graded them C‑or-below), while only 19 percent gave high marks to “public schools nationally.” Basically, people — who often heavily considered schools when they bought their homes — tend to affirm their own choices, but see the overall system as crummy.

And so goes another Phi Delta Kappa/​Gallup poll. See you pollsters next year!

The topic of this weekend’s weekly presidential radio address was education. The message? You guessed it: The federal government needs to “invest” more in education — as do other levels of government — but instead they are making cuts.

At this point I don’t know what more can be said to show how nonexistent is the connection between federal spending and actual education. As we at Cato’s Center for Educational Freedom have pointed out on countless occasions, federal and overall spending on public schooling has skyrocketed for decades as test scores have laid motionless; staffing has ballooned at the same time; Head Start has almost no lasting benefits; and federal higher ed spending largely enables massive price inflation and encourages people to enter college but not finish.

The evidence, frankly, is overwhelming that federal education “investment” is really just flushing precious money down the toilet. Which makes me think that maybe President Obama doesn’t read our stuff. Or maybe he just doesn’t care.

For two years the national curriculum blitz has been rolling through states unabated, with “Common Core” standards now fully adopted in all but five states and development of national tests continuing. Of course all of this has been done with heavy federal air support, including making adoption of Common Core crucial for states wanting to access Race to the Top funds, and Washington selecting and funding the national test developers.

Last week, however, national curriculum forces suffered a small but notable setback, with the Utah State Board of Education withdrawing the Beehive State from the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, one of the two consortia developing tests to accompany the Common Core. In terms of its on-the-ground impact, it’s not huge —Utah will still have the Common Core standards—but symbolically it could be big, showing that states can undo decisions they may have made in haste, or in pursuit of federal money or favors. And to be honest, it is more official push back than I expected.

That said, the crucial point will still be when the Elementary and Secondary Education Act—AKA, No Child Left Behind—comes before Congress for reauthorization. That is when it will be decided whether adopting the Common Core will be necessary for states to get huge amounts of annual federal funding, and whether scores on the national tests will determine whether districts, schools, or children get rewarded or punished. If those measures are included—especially the high-stakes testing—then it is game over: we will have an indisputably federal curriculum, and no state will dare resist it. They simply won’t be willing to jeopardize billions of annual dollars.

Until then, national standards opponents can take heart in Utah’s small act of defiance.