So even if our community wanted to increase teachers where is the money? The state has no budget and is badly in debt. A year ago California had 1.8 million unemployed, 4.7 million living in poverty and 7.3 million with no medical insurance. Those were good days. No comment on our national tactics. From 1966 to 1976 China underwent massive layoffs of teachers. That did not work very well. Today, in China students identified as gifted in mathematics must also study a foreign language, and must be proficient with computers so they are over-taught. What DEEDS ABIDE suggests is to borrow a page from the Chinese playbook: no state or federal taxes for teachers. Having done some teaching I would evaluate as follows: doing what all other districts will do makes Acalanes just average so we get a grade of C. Making the Depression deeper is therefore only worth a D. Since teachers can always be fired, not taking a free shot, courtesy some creative financing, to be one of the few is barely an F. It is likely that human beings have been making desperate journeys to come to California from the other four continents for over twenty thousand years. We would like to think if those immigrants could survive the oceans, Ice Age glaciers, saber-tooth cats and comet strikes it should be possible for all their modern day descendants to get a
decent education. China will not wait.