Same for the teachers in the Bay Area? I always think this is a great problem for K-12 education. If a teacher has to spend 2 hours to commute to her school, I can't imagine how the teacher would have enough energy to teach kids well. In a great scheme of things, I wonder if kids in the US succeed despite the failures of the US K-12 education. The sad truth is, the majority of the students, millions of them, do need great teachers to push and nurture them in order to grow to their full potential. I can't imagine how exhausted teachers can ever do so.

In contrast, I grew up in China when we had only public education. China did not join the WTO by then, and was quite poor in the current standard. Yet my teachers, for whom I'm forever grateful, painstakingly made sure we understood the fundamentals of science, math, reading, and writing. They designed daily exercises to push our boundaries. They gave timely feedbacks to us (we had at least two 2-hour long exams per subject every week in addition to daily homework, and most of the questions were proof and word problems. Grading them for 50 students in a day or two was not a small feat). I would never push myself as hard as my teachers did, and thanks to them, I could easily thrive in an elite university here and became a TA of CS courses in a sophomore year. I'm sure this is nothing to the elite students here, but I'm not sure if the system of the US can enable the non-elite students like me to achieve such.

If anything, I would love to see my tax dollars go to teachers, increasing their salary by at least 2X. Things like ipad in classroom, compute software this and Epic books that, are really not that essential.