Seems Simple Enough 

Hat tip to VodkaPundit for the link to an article in the Washington Post about the 65% Solution:

Patrick Byrne, a 42-year-old bear of a man who bristles with ideas that have made him rich and restless, has an idea that can provide a new desktop computer for every student in America without costing taxpayers a new nickel. Or it could provide 300,000 new $40,000-a-year teachers without any increase in taxes. His idea -- call it the 65 Percent Solution -- is politically delicious because it unites parents, taxpayers and teachers while, he hopes, sowing dissension in the ranks of the teachers unions, which he considers the principal institutional impediment to improving primary and secondary education.

The idea, which will face its first referendum in Arizona, is to require that 65 percent of every school district's education operational budget be spent on classroom instruction. On, that is, teachers and pupils, not bureaucracy.
...
Under the 65 percent rule, Arizona, which spends 56.8 percent in classrooms, could use its $451 million transfer to classrooms to buy 1.5 million computers or to hire 11,275 teachers. California (61.7 percent) could use its $1.5 billion transfer to buy 5 million computers or to hire 37,500 teachers. Illinois (59.5 percent) would transfer $906 million to classrooms (3 million computers or 22,650 new teachers). To see how much money would flow into your state's classrooms under Byrne's approach, go to www.firstclasseducation.org.

According to the website listed... Wisconsin uses 62% of funds towards actual classroom education. Increasing this to 65% would amount to approximately $227 million a year. Couple of things not talked about here which are worthy of investigation. In Wisconsin for instance, where does the extra 38% go? The claim made in the article is that it simply goes to bureaucracy. Is that really the case? The charge seems to be that you can either spend money on classrooms, or worthless things. Where do sports programs fall? Where do plays and band programs fall? How much of that 38% is really spent on pure bureaucracy?

The other thing that always pisses me off about these articles is how "buying computers" is always touted as an advantage. I'm a software engineer, and damned good at my job. I didn't need the sort of computer centric education that is going on now in order to get to that position. Is some computer experience worthwhile? Absolutely. But I wonder how much value the increase we're seeing in computer based education really gives us. From my own experience with watching a laptop program at MSOE... I know that computers can be more distracting than educational.

My personal view on this is that parents and adults who are still fearful of computers push them heavily, thinking that they don't want what happened to them, to happen to their kids. What they don't realize is that exposure to computers is all you really need. Kids don't need to get a UV tan during the school day from a computer screen. Doing it the old fashioned way on pen and paper drills it into your mind a lot better than seeing it flash before your eyes will on a computer screen. Food for thought.

Jesus - I sound like an old codger talking about this stuff. Next I'll be calling kids whipper snappers.