Arthur Salm is an SDNN columnist.

Can you help us out with school supplies? The first week of instruction, please have your child bring …

Here’s a hot stock tip (assuming such a thing still exists): Proctor & Gamble, or any company that manufactures or distributes such things as paper towels, liquid cleanser, glue sticks, notebook paper, and facial tissue. Because sometime in the next month or two, parents of school-age children will begin receiving pleas like the one above from their kids’ schools. Moms and dads will hit the shelves at supermarkets and big box stores to supply the mini-third-world countries that our public schools are well on their way to becoming.

Not that the natives aren’t doing their best to keep the situation from devolving into something like Sudan. Teachers, parents, and kids pitch in to keep the buildings standing and the surroundings, if not lush, at least pleasant. Chris Moran’s story in Sunday’s Union-Tribune told of students and retired teachers volunteering to help fix up Balboa Elementary School: landscaping, bookshelf-building, and, Moran wrote, assembling “dozens of new picnic tables to replace lunch-area furniture that (Principal Fabiola) Bagula called ‘disgusting.’ The school also got its first real soccer goals.”

What’s flat-out disgusting is that such a situation has been allowed to come to pass. California’s financial collapse is merely the latest blow to our deteriorating public education system. We long ago made the collective decision - unintentionally on the part of many of us, I’d like to think - to eviscerate our schools. A couple of generations ago, California ranked at the very top in per-capita spending for education. Now we’re near the bottom, elbow-to-elbow with Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas.

And here’s how it was accomplished: Through the double-barreled demonization of taxes and teachers.

First, there’s the bad-old-fashioned, straightforward I-got-mine,-screw-you attitude, played out in two ways: 1) Thanks for the good education, suckers, but don’t expect me to pitch in for anybody else; and 2) Taxation is theft. It’s my money. Take a hike.

Second, there are those who believe that, gosh, we really should educate our children, but can’t we do it more efficiently? - a benign-sounding, conscience-salving way of saying “on the cheap.” Well, we’re assured, of course we could, if it weren’t for those lazy, conniving, featherbedding teachers and their thuggish, concrete-overshoes-threatening union bosses.

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(In union-bashing venues like the Union-Tribune’s editorials, it’s always “union bosses” but “corporate officers.”)

At this point I find I have no choice, morally, logically, and emotionally, but to tell you about my experience with the teachers at Roosevelt Middle School. That’s the one that abuts the zoo, the one the zoo tour-bus drivers point out as housing “the most dangerous animals of all.” (Well, they used to, at least.) My daughter graduated earlier this month, so there’s no possible conflict of interest (read: currying of favor).

Now, it’s been a few decades since I attended what was then known as junior high school in Carlsbad. My teachers were, for the most part, fine. One or two were pretty good. But almost without exception, every single teacher my daughter encountered at Roosevelt was outstanding. They’re intelligent, hard-working, thoroughly knowledgeable in their fields and deeply, intensely dedicated to doing the very best job they possibly can, which is, and I’m going to demand that you take my word for it, spectacular. The best teachers I had in middle school would have been the worst teachers at Roosevelt, if they had been tolerated at all, which I doubt.

And teachers do it for not much dough and a lot of flak. In most other modern western countries (I find myself writing that phrase more and more), teachers are paid better, and given the respect we hold in reserve for entrepreneurs. Just try to get a job teaching high school in, say, Finland; it’s unbelievably competitive, because they want the very best for their kids. Makes sense when you think about it, which too many of us obviously don’t.

You’d better believe teachers don’t like being the target of anti-tax zealots, and constantly facing the threat of layoffs - and, for that matter, begging for paper towels. That’s not to mention the staggering demands of the job itself. Yet, somehow we continue to come up with teachers like the ones I encountered at Roosevelt.

Damned if I can explain it.

Arthur Salm is an SDNN columnist.