My home state is something like 48th in education spending and considers it a point of pride because it "makes educators work harder". It was normal for every student to be asked to bring a box of kleenex to school every year because there was no budget to provide that resource.

It terrifies me to see how poorly we treat educators and education in general. As a highly developed nation our only chance for the future is to maintain our edge. We are borrowing against the intellectual (and in the case of public university tuition, also the financial) capital of the future and I'm not even sure what we are doing with the money.