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The audacity of arrogance on parade! Since, the states and communities can’t do it, BHO can! The Administration insists you raise the bar on your education standards or lose funding; translation- adopt our superior national curriculum standards or no soup cash for you!

From an article on MSN:

Obama wants to expand the federal government’s role in education, which traditionally is a state and local responsibility. His approach has been to use the federal purse as leverage to encourage states to adopt his ideas.Many schools count on a key source of federal aid, known as Title I, to help disadvantaged students — $14.5 billion this budget year. Under Obama’s proposal, to qualify for that money, states would have to adopt and certify that they have “college- and career-ready standards in reading and mathematics.” The deadline for setting the new standards is 2014.

Obama wants to encourage states to enact education standards that the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State Schools Officers are developing. All states but Alaska and Texas have endorsed the effort; Kentucky adopted the standards earlier this month.

there’s more:

The Obama administration wants to see a uniform set of standards in schools nationwide, in hopes that it will make the U.S. more competitive internationally. Many other countries operate under a single set of standards.

National curriculum standards is the wrong direction for ed reform, however, plans are full throttle ahead. We must insist that our governors are not bribed or strong-armed into this heinous, losing scheme. Once the feds own our schools, we will never get them back.

The greatness of the national standard curriculum is utterly irrelevant. Students are not uniform in their abilities and cannot be expected to fit into some national or international mold. Not only will this one-size-fits all fail our students but it will kill innovation in curriculum development. Only a free-market creates the necessary competitive environment that facilitates progress.

I made the point in an earlier post that private schooled students consistently far outscore their public school peers. Now, we have homeschooled students outscoring the private schooled kids. Why is this? Simple: individuality. Homeschooled students are the freest learners. The homeschool curriculum market is vast and varied.

Public school students deserve the same benefits of private and homeschooled kids. We can realize this for them through universal school choice. The free market can see that their individual educational needs are met at half the cost.

We must insist education reform pursues what works, for the sake of our children.

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4 Responses
  1. I could be wrong, I believe the education system in each state is their responsibility via the 10th amendment, and while I agree that the curriculum in most public schools is lacking…I had the opportunity to go to public and private schools as a youngster, and I never understood the disparity in curriculum between the two.

    That being said, The federal government has no business attempting to strong arm our school districts.

    Posted by scratchman on March 11th, 2010 at 12:44 pm |

    • No Scratchman, you are not wrong. That is exactly why there should be no Department of Education. No “No Child Left Behind” legislation. The education system now wants the Feds involved because they are drunk on the money that the Feds send to the schools, but the cost has been the freedom of both the local schools as well as the state funding systems.

      I am hopeful that the Republicans can win the State House this fall so that we can work on implementing a common sense school choice program for children with disabilities similar to the McKay scholarships in Florida:

      http://www.floridaschoolchoice.org/Information/McKay/

      These have been highly successful over a long period of time. I have talked with my State Senator and my hopeful State Representative (Kurt Webber – http://www.kurtwebber.com/ ) as well as others.

      Step 1 in getting more school choice in Indiana is for the Republicans to win the State House. I think we can make progress if this happens.

      Posted by Joel Harris on March 12th, 2010 at 7:04 am |

  2. The free-market curriculum is an interesting thing. I very much believe in school choice and competition, but something very interesting is going on in Texas. The state board of education votes on individual issues that may or may not be included in school textbooks. Since Texas is one of the largest consumers of textbooks, these votes basically direct the curriculum for the entire country.

    Posted by davistad44 on March 12th, 2010 at 12:41 pm |

    • I had always heard the same thing about California. I suppose that both cannot be true.

      I saw some video of that Texas session. It looked painful.

      My kids curriculum is determined by my wife and me. That choice is one of the reasons that we chose to pull our kids out of the school system.

      Posted by Joel Harris on March 12th, 2010 at 8:55 pm |

   
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