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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: cnyndwllr who wrote (43592)	11/20/2007 10:25:07 PM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 540724

Ed, As I said in several of my posts, I don't think this issue is an either/or one. The federal government already plays a role in k-12 public education. Federalism, whatever else it has meant, has never meant that the federal government had no role there. Now as to the content of the education of your children, if you keep them at home, you get to decide. And, of course, you have to live with the consequences. If, however, you send them to public schools, you actually have very little role in deciding. By and large the education professionals make those decisions. That's, of course, not true in every place. But sufficiently so for the generalization to hold. Whether we like it or not most public school education is already homogenized. The combination of professional standards, the impact of the national media on local cultures, the desire for upward mobility, etc., makes the local versus national conflict pretty moot. At least at core levels. For most of the country. So I'm not terribly concerned at the standards level. My concern is the level of funding. Some states do a terrible job of it, particularly with population elements that lack political clout. I would like to see more mandates in terms of the role of education as a bastion of equalizing, however slightly, the opportunity structure.