The United States in general, and American education in particular, seems to have a history of pendulum swings---we never seem able to stop at a "happy medium" or realize that the optimum lies somewhere in between the two extremes.
This might be, as some posters have pointed out, a swing back toward orphanages.
I'm with you on that. I've seen welfare cases that aren't as bad as what they're talking about, and I think even THOSE kids would have been better off in an orphanage.
It's the long range potential for abuse of the system that concerns me. Right now, saving kids from crack addict parents is not a bad reason. Saving them from Christian parents because the though police don't like what they're being taught, that scares me. This sort of thing happened in the Soviet Union. It's not out of the realm of possibility.