The old idea of a Constitution was to establish the rules of the game, and allow different game plans to be tried. The new idea, of course, is to write in stasis at the beginning, and keep the closed system going forever. (There's nothing like "stasis" for job security!)

Florida's constitutional micromanagement of public education? That's not a bug, that's a feature . . . or so says the education establishment. Frankly, to me it still looks like a bug. Not a Gregor Samsa of a bug, but a bug nevertheless.

Laughing All The Way to the Bank
Various voucher and choice-in-education plans actually exist in several locales in America. You hear surprisingly little about them in the news, however.

But then, you hear surprisingly little about the deep perversities of the dominant monopoly system, either. For example, had John Stossel not twice aired his special Stupid in America, how many Americans would know anything about New York City's "Rubber Rooms"?

Now, thanks to Stossel, people around America are at least aware of the reductio ad absurdum of monopoly schooling. They know that some teachers get paid not to teach, but instead get housed in centers where they can goof off and collect their pay.

No hyperbole: it's so hard to fire teachers in New York City that the worst of the worst are taken away from students and housed in buildings informally called "Rubber Rooms," where they get to sit around and do nothing all day. At taxpayer expense.

Stossel related the startling truth about one Rubber Room consignee, a man who'd written explicitly sexual emails to an underage student. He confessed. And yet, still, he couldn't be fired.

In his special, Stossel showed the pages and pages of steps it takes to fire a teacher in New York. But on TV all you get to see of the document is the length of those pages, not the grisly detail.

So Stossel presented the flow chart in the October issue of Reason magazine. Buy it. Read it and weep.

Or, since it's drawn in old Suck.com cartoon style, laugh.

Which brings us back to comedy. Too bad those Hollywood folk are so slow on the uptake. In a better world, we would already have had a sitcom or reality show based on the Rubber Rooms. All America could laugh at insane government and greedy, out-of-control teachers' unions.

And then, after that, maybe our schools could grow up.