because every child needs phonics. we also need core knowledge. i think people have underestimated how important it is to have foundational knowledge in order to read. you have to know something to learn something. and if you take out history and science out of the school system, you re going to disadvantage kids. but you re also taking the best and the brightest, those who you don t take, those who are at the bottom, what are they left with? because they re spending trillions of dollars on education in this country and still we re failing so many kids. we spend more money in this country on education than any country around the globe. and yet our results are the report card. and so it s not money helps, but it won t guarantee you excellence. we have to do things differently. we have to train teachers differently. we have to use better curriculum, better math problems. and we have to be invested.
and for whatever reason, the people around the president convinced him that this was something to celebrate and something to make a big deal of as we all know, it blew up right in their faces. there is the picture. do you think this picture could potentially hunt the president in the next couple of years? you wrote in your column that the way to find out if he deserved it was to have a court-martial. right. people are convicting him without a trial and that troubles me because there are serious questions. but we have a system of justice in the military and it may well be appropriate to charge him. that s a decision the military has to make. so yes, i absolutely think, eric, that that picture was a picture you don t take, you don t put out there and you let the system work its way out. i can see and understand that you don t want to leave him with the taliban, as we re leaving the country. but on the other hand, you don t make it like saturday afternoon follies, we were all excited.