Will Franciscan throwing of money at schools and teachers be now deemed "a new way of helping our children", or likely all by itself to increase odds young people will become brainier, find or create new enterprises, be more creative, and otherwise save their and our economic futures? That seems to be what many public personalities are telling us, while forgetting to mention little things like ongoing collective poor student performances (q.v., e.g., http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/25/education/25reading.html ; it seems the smarter kids get at math of less than advanced levels, the less they understand about contexts which math might help them assess...like giving someone a great tool, but forbidding them anything to use it on).   

Twenty years ago, in a book entitled "Politics, Markets, and America's Schools", John Chubb of Brooking Institution and Terry Moe of Stanford University said:

"Among the reasons why direct external control may interfere with the development of an effective school, perhaps the most important is the potentially debilitating influence of external control over personnel. If principals have little or no control over who teaches in their schools, they are likely to be saddled with a number of teachers, perhaps even many teachers, whom they regard as bad fits. In an organization that works best through shared decision-making and delegated authority, a staff that is in conflict with the leader and with itself is a serious problem . . . such conflict may be a school’s greatest organizational problem. Personnel policies that promote such conflict may be a school’s greatest burden." [End of citation]

A much more in-depth exploration of this topic, in a condensed overview, was done in 1993 by John Hood, then research director of the State policy think tank known as the John Locke Foundation in Raleigh, North Carolina; one of his historically comprehensive topic articles, "The Failure of American Public Education", currently appears at http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/the-failure-of-american-public-education/# . This article appears to articulate the same kinds of issues people such as myself currently consider.

To reiterate a recent opinion of mine, I fail to see how simply funding teachers and materials/facilities has GOT to make things brighter where it shall remain status quo that more and more people will not understand what they see or are told but will compute it as educators spurred by government agendas have instructed.