Sickeningly, this is where we run into the second problem: Reality? Most parents don't care enough to fight. I well remember ten years or twelve years ago when the liberals around here were just starting to try to worm an outcome-based education curriculum into place. We, along with some other concerned parents, tried to organize and fight it. Ran ads in the papers about meetings, etc. Twenty or thirty people showed up at the first meeting. After that, five or six. Very few people care enough to fight anymore. Everyone is so wrapped up in their comfortable little cocoons and they don't want to be disturbed.
Before long, we had schools that didn't check spelling. Didn't assign grades. Forbade the use of red marks on students' papers because that had a negative connotation. The final straw came when my daughter, in the third grade at the time, asked if she could have permission to lie to her teacher. We were naturally surprised by such an unusual question and asked what she was talking about. She said the teacher went around the class each morning asking the kids what they'd had for breakfast. When my daughter answered, it was usually bacon, eggs, toast, things like that. For which she would be told by the teacher how horrible it was to eat things like that, how she needed to start refusing to eat such breakfasts and instead demand fruit and such from her parents. We pulled her out of that school the next day and put her in another one that hadn't yet gone that far, but it was still one liberal idea to battle after another for the next nine years.
MM