Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby offers a startling statistic:

Blaming the Department of Education isn’t only a matter of post hoc ergo propter hoc, and I’d say the unionization of teachers played an equal or greater role in destroying American education.  To be sure, both developments echo a similar underlying problem in the same direction:  They move education farther from families’ ability to force accountability for failure on the system.  The Department of Education facilitates top-down policy from far-away D.C., in part by empowering academic experimenters, while teachers’ unions transform the workforce on the scene into an unaccountable jobs program.

But again:  People don’t have to agree with my conclusions for us to agree that we ought to be debating this problem more.