I shouldn’t be here. I have other fish to fry. Big fish. Important fish. Fish I have been de-boning and sautéing and flourishing with herbs. Fish I dearly want to eat. Need to eat. I shouldn’t have to be here. More precisely, I shouldn’t have to be here. I finished school a long, long time ago, and, to be honest, I wasn’t always too crazy about it then. Not incidentally, I did spend my fair share of time in the principal’s office. I thought I was done with school. I had gone to my school’s public school for twelve years, and then spent another six in college and graduate school. I had done my time, served and been discharged. I had moved on. But here I am, sitting with the principal. I should be writing about global conspiracies and terrorism and immigration, and here I am, talking about education. Because I really don’t have a choice. Because it’s that important, and that screwed up.

Cut through it all, some things are hard to figure out – cyber warfare, health care, the Chicago Cubs – and some aren’t so hard – taking the lead out of toys, the asbestos out of homes, and the mystery regarding what’s wrong with public education in America. Bottom line: A lot is wrong with public education in this country: Teacher salaries, tenure, testing, unions, governmental action and governmental inaction, political priorities, parental involvement, or lack of - for a start. However, as important as these issues are, they are ultimately secondary to the key point, as well as the spine of our story, and the riddle of the day: Why won’t Arizona fund education?In the Smartest State rankings, based on twenty-one elementary and secondary education indicators reported from Education State Rankings, including expenditures for instruction, pupil-teacher ratios, high school graduation and dropout rates, and reading, writing and math proficiency, Vermont ranks number one, Nebraska is eleven, West Virginia is thirty-seven, Mississippi is forty-eight, and Arizona - sunny, successful, forward-looking Arizona - is fifty. It is virtually inconceivable that one of the wealthiest communities in America does not demand excellence from its schools, but that’s the case. Why? What do the parents think? What about the school administrators? It’s not as if one needs be an expert to figure out that the classrooms are too crowded, the teachers underpaid and underappreciated, the local standards embarrassingly low. Education is a visceral experience, with objective standards married to an entirely human enterprise, replete with all the imprecision that every human endeavor entails. And so it’s not all about money. The Department of Education, with its $67.2 billion annual budget, overseeing more than 14,000 school districts and 56 million students attending 94,000 public schools and 28,000 private schools, hasn’t been a model of efficacy.

So here I am. And as much as I am concerned about the future of American education for America’s sake, I have to admit I’m here for basically two reasons: Emily and Sarah. Emily will be 10 this month and Sarah is 5. While Sarah’s educational experience has been limited to pre-school, on her way to kindergarten in the fall, Emily’s an old pro, just finishing 4th grade. For the past 6 years, she’s attended Phoenix Country Day School, set on forty acres of playing fields and new construction in the shadow of Camelback Mountain, a picture postcard private academy for the scions of the local elite, the leading educational institution in the Valley of the Sun….a self-generated reputation that allows it to charge $20,000 per annum, granting it the status as the most expensive school in the area. Now I know that’s nothing compared to what people are paying elsewhere. My own brother pays $30,000 plus in New York. Still, anyway you cut it, twenty thou is a lot of money to teach little Johnny how to read. For years, PCDS didn’t extract such a princely sum from parents, and while the school had its share of rich folk, it also welcomed a healthy mix of middle-class and upper-middle-class types: doctors, lawyers, and simply people who worked somewhere for somebody else. However, changes were afoot, and, to the influx of refugees from NY, LA, Chicago and elsewhere, people who had socked away big money and were now moving to Arizona to, more often than not, basically retire from real life and sit in their living rooms and check their investments on-line, PCDS was not only located in the valley’s fanciest neighborhood, readily adjacent to their new 6,000 square-foot homes, but a bargain to boot. And at some point, the powers-that-be at PCDS saw all this new money moving to Arizona and decided that was the way to go, to grab for as much as they could get, and, in doing so, hand over the intellectual, financial and spiritual keys of the school. And that has proved both disheartening and ruinous.But I’m getting ahead of myself.