David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

in the United States was staggering:
between 1890 and 1990, in constant
dollars, the bill went from $2 billion to
$187 billion, with that spending
accelerating toward the end of the
century. That money went,
overwhelmingly, toward hiring more
teachers in order to make classes
smaller. Between 1970 and 1990, the
pupil-staff ratio in American public
schools fell from 20.5 to 15.4, and
paying for all those extra teachers
accounted for the lion’s share of the tens
of billions of dollars in extra
educational spending in those years.
Why did this happen? One answer
lies in the politics of the educational