You know how this almost-six-year-old is no fan of the huge spending bill the President flew out here to sign last week. While it sounds nice on paper, I’m here to clue you in to the fact we aren’t going to be saved by a “magical money tree”.

In the meantime, my Education Policy Center friend Ben DeGrow has a tip on how to make the best out of a bad situation. As he writes in yesterday’s edition of the Colorado Daily – if nearly a billion dollars is going to flow into Colorado for the purposes of K-12 education, let’s at least attach it to some serious and radical reforms:

If the federal government is bound to spend untold billions it doesn’t have on education, nearly all would be better served by a student-centered approach to distributing the funds.

Washington would do much better to offer incentives to states and school districts that attach funds directly to students, empowering families with a wide array of public schooling options.

After all, parents best know how to make use of the money to meet their children’s needs.

The so-called “stimulus” is a fait accompli. Yet for all the mammoth debt, the least we can request is more incentive for the money to benefit students directly.

Of course, Ben also knows that federal spending and common sense too often don’t intersect. So there it is: All that debt I’m going to have to pay, and we’ll probably miss a golden chance to fix schools and help more kids like me learn what they need in order to succeed.

Sigh… When are the grown-ups going to stop being in charge?