I am inclined to be sympathetic toward Students First, an education-reform group, because of its association with Michelle Rhee, who seems like one of the good guys. But this tweet from the group made me roll my eyes a little:  “44 years ago America put men on the moon. Imagine if we gave the same effort to improving public education today?”

Granted, “effort” is not the same as “money,” but consider: The cost of the Apollo program was about $125 billion in 2012 dollars. Spending on pre-kindergarten through high-school education last year alone was about $515 billion, more than four times as much, year in and year out.

There are several possible conclusions we could draw from that. One is that giving children a decent education, a trade that was developed to a high degree of sophistication back when Aristotle was tutoring Alexander the Great, has in the intervening years somehow become more difficult and demanding than is space exploration. I assign that very low probability to that proposition. A second possibility is that the relationship between money spent on education and educational outcomes is unpredictable, which is consistent with a great deal of data and suggests that, contra all those bone-headed bumper stickers about the Pentagon and bake sales, the problem with the U.S. educational system is not the availability of financial resources.

Rhee’s group, as the tweet above reminds us, is dedicated to the proposition that public education should be reformed. But should implies can, and it is possible that no amount of policy innovation will be sufficient to reform that system, because the financial interests dependent upon the current failed model of education — financial interests that include, for example, the entire Democratic party, down to the last dog-catcher and hanger-on — will never give up that half-a-trillion-a-year gravy train. If you think farm subsidies are eternal and defense-contractors are rapacious, wait until you try to pry the NEA and the NFT AFT off of the national nipple. 

By all means, conservatives should continue to press for such reforms to the public-education system as are possible, especially changes that attach funding to students’ and families’ choices rather than to political institutions. But conservatives, whose first duty is to reality, should also be forthright about the fact that rescuing as many children as possible, especially poor children, from the government education monopolies probably is the best recipe for reform. There is a reason that in everything from architecture to organizational structure, a great many of our government schools are indistinguishable from jails. Neither set of institutions is operated for the benefit of those incarcerated within.

(NOTE: Thanks for the correction: American Federation of Teachers, not National Federation of Teachers. I get a F in parasitology.)