That’s the topic of a commentary I just wrote at BigGovernment.com, tied to recent efforts to prop up public school employment with another $23 billion bailout. I won’t repeat the text of that post here, but thought the two charts bear repeating. The first shows that employment has grown 10 times faster than enrollment over the past 40 years.

The second chart shows how the total cost of sending a single child through the public school system has changed over the years, along with trends in student achievement.