The idea that all we need is more uniformity and more centralized government control over education to solve all the problems in our schools is offensively ridiculous.
Look at our college and university system - it is, by and large, the envy of the civilized world, and students the world over flock to the US to pursue advanced degrees.
Why is this?
Because there is a free market in colleges and universities, with a broad array of choice and price points, from vocational technical colleges and community colleges at a hundred bucks a credit or less, up to rarified Ivy League schools that can set you back hundreds of thousands.
And they're all competing with one another for the best students, and the students are competing with one another for the best schools. It's about as far removed from the one-size-fits-all government-run primary school systems as it can be.
What we need is NOT more government control - that is to say, more and more of what we've had more and more of over the past decades as our performance has slid further and further.
Rather, we need to get government OUT of the business of education, and let the market forces - which have been so ruthlessly stifled in primary education - take hold.
In Soviet Russia, the government was in charge of every aspect of bread production, and you were lucky to get one pound of stale, mealy bread in a week. In the US, where bread is produced in a free market of profit-seeking competition, we have entire aisles in our grocery store selling 50 different kinds of bread from a dozen different bakeries.
The education of our children is too important a task to allow the government to run.
I have to say I am always for the free market. I think you make a lot of sense.
"What we need is NOT more government control - that is to say, more and more of what we've had more and more of over the past decades as our performance has slid further and further. Rather, we need to get government OUT of the business of education, and let the market forces - which have been so ruthlessly stifled in primary education - take hold."
AMEN to that BUMP!
Getting the government out of education is not the answer. All of the countries which out-strip us in education have state schools, though in Japan, these are supplemented with lots of private 'cram schools' and educational pre-schools.
The success of American higher-education (despite the best efforts of leftist idiots within) suggests a good model: a mixed system of goverment schools and private schools with direct and indirect government support. (I know Penn gets monies for various purposes from the Pennsylvania legislature, despite being private, and all prestegious universities are supported in part by government research grants and contracts, even as all colleges and universities are indirectly funded through government financial aid to students.)
The thing we need to get government out of is granting a monopoly on teaching to 'ed majors'. When my father was in high school in the 1940's, his teachers all had at least masters degrees in the subjects they taught, with one or two Ph.D.'s among them. Now high schools are taught by people with degrees in secondary education--only elementary education is more of a pud major at most universities. Now, with the exception of a few states in the Northeast where old prestegious private schools would throw fits if they couldn't hire actually qualified teachers with real academic degrees in their subject matter, in almost every state in the union, the legislature has granted a monopoly to the products of 'Colleges of Education' (purportedly to ensure the quality of teachers, though in fact having the opposite effect) not just in state schools but in private schools accredited by the state as well.
That's absolutely true.