Ranger, I do not like to see more power in the hands of the feds. LIke the IRS, it draws flies. Did you watch the Hillsdale vid? What do you think of its content? Honest question.
I have to apologize oldtrapper, I missed this video until now. I agree with the professor on almost every point. Ideally, education would be just as he describes it with the end result being happiness. The trouble is that he approaches education through the eyes of an educator who has dealt specifically with those who want it. From what I gathered, he works with the formation and facilitation of charter schools. The children that attend these schools are generally the cream of the crop. He isn't taking into account the realities of public education, the children that have terrible home lives, learning disabilities, etc. If I could eliminate all of the children from public school that aren't high achievers (private school candidates), I could instantly solve the problem of low achievement in public schools. Since that isn't realistic, we have to look elsewhere for solutions, bearing in mind that no solution will be perfect.
Now I would love it if the federal government would keep its nose out of my life completely. I also know that this would mean that I wouldn't have nice highways to drive on, huge areas of public land to play on, and many other things that I truly enjoy taking advantage of. Would it be a worthwhile trade? Possibly. But it isn't realistic to expect this. The strings that are tied to federal and even state funding of schools, remove a great deal of local control. One need look no further than the horrible school lunch program, pushed on us by Michelle Obama/fed gov, to see this point illustrated. If you don't want to follow the program, you lose federal funding for your lunch program. This is the simple reality of running a school today. There isn't enough local money to get it done.
For years I've heard fellow conservatives rail against public schools and the lack of accountability. When the federal government stepped in and tried to force accountability on public schools through performance based funding with NCLB, many of these same conservatives complained that the federal government dare get involved. If you want accountability, you have to measure success. If you want to measure success, you have to base your curriculum on this measure.
As far as CC goes, it's far from perfect. There is not enough focus on social studies, foreign language, and the arts. What it is, however, is a baseline for measuring the success of all schools. Good schools will go far beyond what is asked of them in CC, poor schools will not. The upside is that all schools should perform to this minimum standard in order to maintain funding. For many, this will result in a vast improvement, for others, the only change will be in the pacing of curricular events.
The way I look at this is that performance based funding isn't going to go away. I don't necessarily think that it should either. CC is an improvement over the shapeless means of determining performance that was seen with NCLB, so I can see no reason to fault it until it's had some time to grow. It isn't going to take away anyone's soul, it isn't a dumbing down of curricula, it's an attempt to align curricula with testing. Not at all perfect, but not a communist conspiracy either.
