"With a few exceptions, states have no money. That may not be all so bad - the State of
California has not historically been successful with takeovers of failing districts.
Counties and cities are in equally dire straits. So, we actually simulated what happens if
all fifty million public school students go to private and religious schools. As those
results were quite dismal, we next looked at what it would cost just to stabilize schools.
The bill for keeping most threatened schools open, retaining working teachers and even
hiring back teachers fired in 2009 was about thirty (30) billion dollars. That would
mean revisiting the same problem in a year. As most mathematicians are lazy, solving
the same problem more than once is considered a disgrace. So it seemed what was needed was an
answer as universal as geometry; which was financially feasible; and which did not ruin our planet.
Now someone might ask 'won't the schools be in good shape once unemployment drops below 4
percent and real estate stabilizes?' Campolindo might survive that long. De Anza and Antioch will be
long gone.
Our numbers say this generation of school children is out of time. And so is America. Education has
to trigger the recovery rather than waiting for it. The only solution we can find now is for the Federal
government to LOAN money to school districts from Nome to New Orleans to purchase and install
solar panels and batteries. The districts from Ensenada in California to Ellsworth in Maine save
money on their electrical bills and can sell surplus power back to utility companies while paying
down the loans. Besides saving teaching and staff jobs, companies from Waimea in Hawaii to
Washington DC that supply schools will stay in business. Our calculations show more than three
million jobs will need to be created in solar power and the smart grid for schools alone. For
graduating students who don't fancy a career in energy, we believe the United States needs to set a
goal of a student to teacher ratio of 10:1. That would be another two million teachers needed from
Seattle to Savannah.
For good and for ill, the American economy is highly interconnected all over the globe. When we
looked at the international consequences of inexorable decreases in American purchases of imported
petroleum the ramifications for countries like Venezuela and Iran, to name a few, are considerable.
Among others, an early 20th century theoretician, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, pointed out that one
could not make an omelette without breaking eggs. We have every confidence that several clever
economists in Caracas and Tehran have already computed that the same geometry applies:
Venezuela, like many Caribbean countries, cannot keeping burning oil and hoping that there is
enough rain to provide hydroelectric power. The same problem applies in southwestern Asia: after
the oil runs out, then what? We would like it if our children's children in improving American schools
were taught Spanish and Portuguese and Quechua and Aymara and Arabic and Farsi so engineers
from the United States could work internationally on joint ventured projects using the very same
sunlight. And we would like it even more if schools in two hundred countries taught English and C++
so everyone there could read and understand how America rebuilt itself.
We are willing to defend the geometric assertion that how strong any bounded society such as a
nation, state, county or school is can be measured by how it treats its weakest."