We hear constantly about how American students are losing ground in worldwide performance standards. We score around 500 out of 1,000 in a number of important categories like reading and science.

Every three years the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) report is compiled and released, comparing the knowledge and skills of 15-year-olds in 70 countries around the world. The United States ranks 14th of 34 OECD countries for reading skills, 17th for science, and a dismal 25th for mathematics.

The man-on-the-street interview has become common fodder for comedy shows, because the ignorance of the average American is overwhelmingly predictable. If you don’t believe it, casually ask someone in Starbucks the most fundamental of social studies questions: how many senators are in the US congress, or even the name of the vice president. You will be surprised at the number of blank stares you receive.

The Dumbing Down of America

So what do children learn in schools under the stern directives of the National Education Association? They learn about global warming, necessary tolerance for abhorrent human behaviors, and about how bad President Bush was. They are taught to speak out vehemently against anything and everything that is traditional or moral, and to blindly embrace every edict and dogma of the left.

Our classrooms are often filled with NEA union “change agents,” set in place to transition impressionable minds from logical and moral thought to leftist nonsense of redistribution and “fairness.” Our children don’t dare question the dogmatic edicts of these “community organizers” whose job it is to preach the gospel of the left, numbing the minds of the children and getting them to thoughtlessly repeat the chants and talking points of liberals.

Even in conservative Provo, Utah, we’ve received reports of a female seventh-grade teacher who recently bullied a female student in front of the class for having a note in her papers on the desk that she was supporting Mitt Romney for president. When the girl’s father asked the principal why his daughter was berated in front of the entire class and called “stupid” for her written thought, he was threatened with a lawsuit and a restraining order if he mentioned the incident outside of the principal’s office.

With all of that “education” going on, it’s no wonder that there is no time or energy left over for things like reading, writing and arithmetic.

“This is an absolute wake-up call for America,” U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in an interview with The Associated Press. “The results are extraordinarily challenging to us and we have to deal with the brutal truth. We have to get much more serious about investing in education.”

Does Education Need More Money?

Duncan’s use of the word “investing” is liberal-speak for raising taxes and feeding the NEA with more money to donate to Democratic candidate political campaigns. In fact, where students are more likely to drop out of school, and to be unemployed when they leave school, we find the highest levels of NEA influence, and the highest support for Democrats. Think east coast and west coast cities, Chicago, Detroit, etc.

Indeed, we constantly hear how underpaid teachers are, and how our schools need more money for the classrooms. Let’s look at some real numbers. First, we spend more than $9,000 per student per year on K-12 education (far more than all the countries who beat us in PISA reports), totaling over $120,000 per student by high school graduation. That is over $800 billion annually, which is a full 4.5% of our gross domestic product.

So where does all of this money go? Around 60% goes to classroom instruction, including teachers’ salaries. The rest (40%) goes to non-teaching employees and extras, in place mainly to ensure federal compliance, to qualify for the small percentage of the local budget that comes from Washington, D.C.

According to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, mechanical engineers earn $31.93 per hour, but public school teachers earn on average more than $34.00 per hour, with an average annual salary of over $47,000. That salary is for a job that consumes just 36.5 hours per week compared with many hours more for nearly everyone else. Compared with public school teachers, editors and reporters earn 24% less; architects, 11% less; psychologists, 9% less; chemists, 5% less; mechanical engineers, 6% less; and economists, 1% less. It is true that there are those who earn more than public school teachers. Nuclear engineers earn 17% more; actuaries, 9% more; and physicists, 3% more. There are public school teachers working for a number of failing school systems who are earning a lot more than most people. The Detroit metropolitan area has the highest average public school teacher pay among metropolitan areas for which data are available, at $47.28 per hour, followed by the San Francisco metropolitan area at $46.70 per hour, and the New York metropolitan area at $45.79 per hour.

We need to invest more? No, we need to take back control of our schools and ensure that motivated teachers are teaching basic educational courses—the kind of subjects that are tested and measured internationally. We need to make sure there is competition in the teaching profession, something the NEA has fought with tremendous ferocity. We need to reward teachers who excel, and fire teachers who aren’t teaching useful subject matter to our children.

PUBLIUS

Currently in the U.S., state governments are only obligated to collect sales taxes from online retailers that are based in their own states. If an online sales tax bill makes it to law, states could collect from online retailers that don’t reside in their state.

There’s a good chance you’ve heard of the Marketplace Fairness Act (S.336), before. The bill aims to ensure that states receive taxes that they’ve been otherwise missing out on. A similar proposal is up for vote in the Senate this week thanks to an amendment to a Democratic budget resolution from Senators Mike Enzi and Dick Durbin (pictured), who sponsored the bill.

Opponents are slamming the Senators for trying to “sneak” the legislation through. The Hill reports:

Phil Bond, the executive director of the WE R HERE coalition, accused backers of online sales tax measures of trying to “sneak through” their legislation outside regular congressional order.

“There are good reasons this policy hasn’t been considered in the US Senate for over a decade: Taxpayers don’t like it, it turns the Internet into a tax collection platform, it allows state tax collectors to exercise authority far beyond their boundaries and it will put thousands of small businesses out of business,” Bond, a top Commerce Department official under George W. Bush, said in a statement.

The official summary of the Marketplace Fairness Act says:

The Marketplace Fairness Act grants states the authority to compel online and catalog retailers (“remote sellers”), no matter where they are located, to collect sales tax at the time of a transaction – exactly like local retailers are already required to do. However, there is a caveat: States are only granted this authority after they have simplified their sales tax laws.

Simplification is required because of two Supreme Court rulings (Bellas Hess and Quill, described below) cite concern that collecting sales tax for multiple states would be too difficult.

The Marketplace Fairness Act requires that states must simplify their sales tax laws in order to ease those concerns and make multistate sales tax collection easy. Specifically, states seeking collection authority have two options for simplifying their sales tax laws.

Under the Marketplace Fairness Act, states can join others that have already adopted “simplification measures” of the Streamlined Sales and Use Tax Agreement (SSUTA) or they can meet five mandates listed in the bill. States would have to agree to:

• Notify retailers in advance of any rate changes within the state
• Designate a single state organization to handle sales tax registrations, filings, and audits
• Establish a uniform sales tax base for use throughout the state
• Use destination sourcing to determine sales tax rates for out-of-state purchases (a purchase made by a consumer in California from a retailer in Ohio is taxed at the California rate, and the sales tax collected is remitted to California to fund projects and services there)
• Provide free software for managing sales tax compliance, and hold retailers harmless for any errors that result from relying on state-provided systems and data

You can take a look at the bill here. Hundreds of national trade associations, state and local trade associations and businesses support the bill. These are listed here. They include Amazon, Autozone, Barnes and Noble, Bed, Bath, & Beyond, Best Buy, Buy.com, Foot Locker, Gap, Home Depot, Kroger, Lowes, Meijer, J.C. Penney, Safeway, Sears, Petsmart, and Walmart, to name a few.

The bill’s site only lists ten opponents, including: eBay, American Catalog Mailers Assocation, Americans For Prosperity, Campaign for Liberty, Center for Freedom and Prosperity, Computer & Communications Industry Association, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Direct Marketing Association, Freedomwworks, Heartland Institute, Heritage Foundation, National Taxpayers Union, NetChoice, R Street, TechNet, and We R Here Coalition.

AT&T, Council on State Taxation, National Cable and Telecommunications Association, National Federation of Independent Business, and Verizon are listed as neutral or undecided.

The main difference between the Marketplace Fairness Act, and what is coming up for vote this week, is that the new proposal doesn’t include the mandatory simplification, and is non-binding, as CNET’s chief political correspondent Declan McCullagh explains.

“It appears to be intended as a clever political hack: secure plenty of votes on a non-binding Internet tax amendment, then use those vote totals to argue there’s sufficient support for S.336 when it’s up for a binding vote later,” he says, before going to quote eBay’s senior director of federal government regulations and global public policy, Brian Bieron:

“The strategy of the bill’s supporters is to offer this general amendment and then claim that all the senators that vote for it support the bill. That is not just a stretch, it is not accurate. But the game plan is to rack up a sizable vote and then make the claim the bill itself should jump over the Finance Committee and go right to the floor.”

Hence the “sneaking” accusations.

Some supporters of the legislation think it’s really just a matter of when, rather than a matter of if, and whatever happens with this week’s vote could have a significant bearing on that.

Either way, brick-and-mortars have ramped up their lobbying for online sales tax, but opponents claim it’s bad for consumers and for small businesses.

Chris Crum – Follow Chris on Twitter, on StumbleUpon, on Pinterest and/or on Google: +Chris Crum.