Though our nation's education system may be poor in money, and in smarts, we are blessed with a vibrant crop of overqualified, idealistic young people who are willing to take on tough, low-paid teaching jobs in order to make a difference in the world. Let's fire them all.

This (among many other things, which we will ignore), friends, is what is wrong with the American education system: New York City is about to lay off more than 4,000 teachers. And they're coming for the young idealists first.

Because state law dictates that the last teachers hired must be the first let go - with a few exceptions for those hard-to-find teachers in subjects like special education and English as a second language - many of those who will be laid off if the budget is approved by the City Council are young idealists like Ms. Sherwood, whom the mayor and like-minded reformers had rallied to some of the city's most challenging classrooms.

Go to all the god damn trouble of recruiting the few Ivy League kids who didn't go into fucking finance and take advantage of their idealism to stick them in underpaid teaching jobs in the city's worst schools; then, turn around and fire them a couple of years later, thanks to "last in, first out." Meanwhile, NYC schools are so overcrowded that kids are peeing their pants waiting in line for the bathroom, and high school kids can barely string together an intelligible sentence, and now, from pee-pee pants years right up through the day they're awarded a high school diploma they can't decipher, your children will be taught not by the best and the brightest educators, but by the oldest. Because the aged are famous for bringing to their dreary jobs the zest and energy necessary to awaken our zombielike young generation from its torpid, Playstation-induced slumber.

You know who is to blame for all this? Poor people, somehow.

[Photo via AP]