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For me, step #1 is removing the feds from every aspect of education. There were schools in the 18th Century, and our Founders saw the wisdom to leave it out of the Constitution, and thus, by the 10th Amendment, it belongs to the states. The feds conveniently ignore this by making it "voluntary" to follow their dictates... but any schools failing to obey get their funding cut off. The fads only contribute about 7-8 percent of the budget, but schools (thanks primarily to unions) are stretched so thin that they cannot afford to lose 7-8 percent, so they meekly comply.

My viewpoint however, is that if we have 50 different systems, the best ideas will become apparent, and those states which didn't implement them initially can copy them soon thereafter. The crucible of ideas gets tested and compared to many others. The best ones survive. When we all simply obey the over-reaching and all-encompassing ideas from DC (which are often the worst kind of feel-good pap, like Common Core), we do not get to see what other ideas may bring. There is no comparison. It is simply a total failure, with no hope of competition for improvement.

And, not surprisingly, the Fed were mostly not involved in education, until Jimmy Carter created the Dept of Education in 1979.

And, not surprisingly, the Fed were mostly not involved in education, until Jimmy Carter created the Dept of Education in 1979.

Someone else posted this on FR at some point, but I forgot to copy who/where:

In 2010, Barack Obama called for fixing the public education system by giving us the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and “Race to the Top,”

which he said would fix the education system already fixed by the 2001 GW Bush and Ted Kennedy legislation called “No Child Left Behind,”

which was supposed to fix a system supposedly already fixed by a 1994 piece of federal legislation called “Goals 2000,”

which was supposed to fix a system already fixed by “America 2000,”

which was a 1991 response during the Bush administration to a 1983 federal report on education called “A Nation at Risk,

which was published a full four years after Jimmy Carter first fixed the nation’s public school system by establishing a cabinet-level Department of Education in 1979.