You are obviously directly involved in education, judging by the focus of your comment.  However, I must take strong exception to what you are saying for the following reasons:  (1) You state “The trends supported by the right are concerning for our future, as 300 million Americans hope to prepare our kids to be the ones rewarded when competing with a global middle class that will apporach 3 billion in their lifetime”.  I am not sure who you mean exactly by the “right”, since our entire government is actively involved in cheating future generations of a chance for any kind of decent life, much less that of the anomalous “middle class” that is fast disappearing.  The argument of “competing with a global middle class” is a strawman argument to distract the American people from the fact that our main problem with education is our own government.  I have said before in previous comments that there is no economic reason why the US elite should improve our school system when it is much cheaper to simply (a) export jobs to a third world country, or (b) for those jobs that cannot be exported, to import cheap labor from the “global marketplace”.  The solutions to our incredibly poor “educational system” do not lie within the school system as most would have you believe (e.g. poorly trained educators not up to the task), but with the ability of the elite class to shift jobs and labor at will.  There is absolutely NO WAY the US educational system can EVER “compete” with the global labor market.  To give you an example, Walmart employment policies are a good proxy for what is happening to the US economy. They hire at the lowest wage possible, with no benefits and utilize “part-time” labor as much as possible.  THIS “Walmart Model” is where the US educational system is taking us — to a system of low paid workers with an extremely high percentage of “temporary” employees — who would function like “seasonal workers” hired by companies when they need additional labor (e.g. I used to use “Manpower Inc” to fill temporary accounting positions during audit season), then simply let them go after they are no longer needed.  THAT is the IDEAL WORKFORCE for ANY company for jobs that cannot be outsourced overseas — no lengthy job search, health care and benefit packages, vacation issues, or potential problems when an employee doesn’t work out (legal issues) — ALL aspects of hiring employees which cost money (i.e. lost profits) for the company.  THIS is what the free market system is doing to US education, and the American people are apparently too stupid to understand that the ONLY thing companies care about is PROFITS.  WHY, when the entire work is a “temp agency” would they willingly choose to invest in US schools?  (2) You state, The rise of smaller private colleges as student loan mills” to which I agree, and is proof of my accusation, since NONE of these people will EVER get decent-paying jobs and a future as a result of their efforts, but only MASSIVE amounts of student loan debt.  (3) You state “The disincentives for higher education of any type unless you can ‘borrow from your parents’” which is absolutely true, since from an elite point of view, their children are the future leaders of this nation, so why should they deliberately undercut their the future of their children by funding a school system of those who are not “leadership material”?  The huge reduction in school funding for higher education that you see now compared to a few decades ago is literal proof of what I am saying.  (4) You state “The false choices, like having to choose between better english, or science math and gifted programs (we need both, especially here in the southwest where better english would lift more kids up into life-long higher achievement).”  NO child should be allowed into our school system who is not fluent in English.  ANY argument to the contrary is NOT sufficient reason to justify holding back those who are fluent in English, since it handicaps them right from the start and many never catch up.  THIS is probably THE MAJOR reason why our school system is struggling — we have deliberately dumbed it down to the lowest common denominator, and then we whine because our school systems are so poor.  Attempting to create a level playing field at the lowest common denominator level will destroy the future for any child who is forced to hobble along at that level. We are deliberately forcing our children to become mental cripples, all for the sake of some idealistic “multicultural” bullshit.  (5) You state “The backwards anti-science bias and even rewriting of history (less Jefferson in Texas books) that politicians force onto schools, we’re not justanti-evolution and anti-climate science, we’re even anti-metric.”  ALL of these problems would immediately disappear IF we had a strong, uniform system of education.  Needless to say, we must remove religion, or religious-based teaching from the school system.  (6) You state “We had great success with two generations of easier access to higher education: the GI Bill and the middle class wages of the GI Bill adults that schooled the next generation. Now in the face of growing competition, we shoudl be vigorously promoting competition to raise up new inventors, engineers and entrepeneurs, not raising barriers to schooling.”  And we as a nation are doing our level best to make sure that NEVER happens, mainly by refusing to face the reality of what the world has become.
Obama and the Democratic-led Senate again put their political and legislative priorities ahead of students and allowed their loan interest rates to double.