DOES ANYONE EDIT THE CHRONICLE?:

Raising the Bars: Complete sentences: Turning students into prison inmates (Margo Freistadt, January 19, 2003, San Francisco Chronicle)

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.

She probably thinks this is clever, but did her editor ask her how spending $20k more per pupil would reduce the deficit? Posted by Orrin Judd at January 27, 2003 8:03 PM