-Money for necessary resources, money to attract the necessary talent, money to lower class sizes with more rooms/teachers. Money to prevent teachers from working extra jobs/buying school supplies out of pocket.
-Stop using standardized testing/curriculum to track success, ESPECIALLY tying funding into it.

Inner city schooling only highlights the need for both of the above. Sending 10% to privates school on vouchers only fucks over the other 90% even more.

Rob points to parents at the problem - I'd say the poor parenting aspects are part of the culture change that need's to happen. The way we approach academia with a sense of entitlement/hostility is disturbing. Educators should be revered. How do you change a culture?

That's obviously a difficult question - but imagine if more of the brightest/motivated/hardworking of our culture wanted to go into education? How do you attract talent? Money. Job security. Imagine if more people were competing to join those unions/job fields.

This is not to say our current pool of teachers aren't bright/motivated/hardworking, quite the opposite I'd say in general. But I don't think anyone will argue that making it a more attractive field to get into could immensely benefit those working in it.

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How do you measure the worth of a teacher? If not through standardized tests (which I agree are shit), then how do you determine the good from the bad? The energized from the lazy? The encouraging from the discouraging?

There has to be some metric in place to measure the worth of a teacher, and if that teacher doesn't cut the mustard then they need to get fired.

Increases in technology will help to get parents more involved. It's a lot easier to track your child's classes and activities than it was just 10 years ago. Getting and keeping parents involved is the best way to ensure our kids are doing their job as students.

I don't know how you change a culture, but the better question is, why should I care? If a set of people aren't willing to change who they are to make their children better, why should I spend my time and money trying to do that for them?

I don't see a single quantifiable metric that makes sense - maybe retention/graduation rates, but if you set a standardized line for that, you're doing that same idiocy that the testing under NCLB has. There's just no good way to do an objective across-the-board comparison.

Retaining teachers should be up to their supervisors, not whether or not they hit a nationwide quota.

To your other questions:

-If they system improves, then the culture will change.
-I don't see how improving public education requires any of your time and as far as money goes, it's more another piece in the long list of things we should be putting the money we already have towards, not collecting more.
-I assume "why should I care?" was more a hypothetical aside to "why should the public care?" Shouldn't the public care about the improvement of the education the populace? For the good of our communities/nation/fellow man? Or maybe the faux-libertarians among the masses are willing to sacrifice that.

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It's interesting to me, jp, that you list money first. We've tripled per pupil spending since 1970. I'm curious as to how much more you think would be appropriate?

I'm trying to reserve my opinion a bit, trying to hear what others have to say first, but money, in my opinion, is not the solution here.

I would totally respond if I could read the 2nd page.

Hey that worked!

It's more about putting the money into the right things. Schools are overcrowded, teachers are underpaid, students lack resources. That all gets fixed with money. It'd be nice if the money were to get redirected from the already-large education budget, but it should be large, right? At least IMO I'm fine with having an enormous education budget - but as with everything else, there's a lot of waste that needs to be cut out.

Seriously though, as long as it was being used appropriately, I'd be fine with 10x the education budget. And I don't be into Grants/Programs, more needs to be put into the actual infrastructure.

(not that grants/programs are the wasted funding)

Actually rob states without teachers units correlate with lower performance on standardized tests like the SAT. Countries like Finland and south Korea have very strong teachers unions and have among the best secondary educational systems.

Don't let dogma get the best of your opinions rob