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To: Sam Cree
Higher standards are great. Putting the federal government in charge of them in this way is not.
Uniformity of standards also has something to commend it; I was much taken by the C-Span-televised education testimony presented to the governors' conference some years back. That testimony made the point that although there is a standard corpus of knowledge to be learned--decimals and fractions, whatever--there is not only no uniformity between states but no uniformity even inside a single school in the prioritization of the teaching of those things.

Such schools perrenially prove the adage that "If everything is important then nothing is important." Demanding the teaching of everything all the time means the random selection of topics focused on--and without an extraordinary run of luck it means that students will be re-re-taught fractions and never ever taught percentages.

And the point was made that "women and minorities suffer most"--that whatever coherence might exist in a given school district did not avail people who moved repeatedly from one district to another, and that disproportionately happened to low-income kids.

So there is need for a settled way of sequencing things. There is such a thing as a "model law" for state regulation--something which is not mandatory but which is voluntarily adopted by states because it makes sense and there is no overriding rationale to do anything different. There is also such a thing as completely voluntary standards such as Windows, which provides advantages to its adoptees. And it would seem that in a libertarian world McSchools would arise with coherent curricula, perhaps in association with churches.


13 posted on 02/10/2004 6:05:37 AM PST by conservatism_IS_compassion (Belief in your own objectivity is the essence of subjectivity.)
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To: livius
I don't really dispute the point you are making, which I believe is primarily that if the states are messing something up, especially something important, then we can fix it in one stroke by assigning that fix to a central authority, such as the federal government. A lot easier than trying laboriously to go from state to state.

And there's no denying that a fix is badly needed.

I just hate to see the feds assuming more and more power, and our Constitution subverted any further than it is. Although I agree that those things are warped already out of all recognition.

Also, I think that minimum government standards tend to be just that, *minimum* standards.

Yeah, homeschooling is great for parents with the ability to do it, and private or church schools need no standards imposed, as a rule. I believe Milton Friedman has done some work on the voucher issue, but am not too familiar with it.
21 posted on 02/10/2004 7:34:01 AM PST by Sam Cree (Democrats are herd animals)
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To: conservatism_IS_compassion
In a world in which competition rules, I think uniformity of standards would not be an issue. Given that it might be an issue, which I am not yet conceding, I have serious qualms about giving the job to government bureaucracy.
22 posted on 02/10/2004 7:37:14 AM PST by Sam Cree (Democrats are herd animals)
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