The Left knows it, the Right is aware that something needs to be done, they just don't see eye to eye on what exactly that is. No, this is not about health reform debate. This is a whole new can of worms - and it is called the public education debate. And here is an instance of how bad things are. In March, President Obama had a very insightful goal to present for the public education system - something you would have never guessed. He proposed that the No Child Left behind law be changed, so that every boy or girl graduating from high school in this country, find that he or she is either properly prepared for a job, or for college. One wonders what the goal used to be before this bolt from the blue - that every child graduating from high school be fully trained to flip burgers? See this together with how the Texas Board of Education has just decided that it doesn't want any federal money since refusing it gives it the freedom to bring religion into its education curriculum (they are making sure that Thomas Jefferson's writings are all excised from Texas schoolbooks), and you begin to see a very special occurrence taking shape.
Back in the day, when the Republic was just beginning to take shape, it made a lot of sense that every county, every district, every state had the power to decide what it needed to do to educate its children. The Constitution, the federal government really has no say at all in how the states handle their education. Is this method still applicable today in an age where the country's children have to grow up to learn to compete in a viciously competitive world economy? The fact that we don't have one education curriculum for the whole country, that there is no one standard for teacher training or one policy to pay teachers well, helps land us in the situation we have today where our students are often high school graduates and still practically illiterate, where on international assessment tests, American high school graduates often put out mediocre performances.
The school system is broke as everyone knows; this wouldn't be if the policy were not to leave public school funding to the districts. Districts that happen to have high unemployment levels, or work opportunities that don't pay that well, are not going to have much by way of taxes, and they can't pay for their public schooling. On the other hand, a district where a Hyundai plant just opened up, is going to have plenty of taxes coming its way and it's going to have money to spend on the school system. If the entire public education system, curriculum and all, were left to federal financing and oversight, every district in the land would have the same standard of excellence in its schooling.
You'd never guess why Dubya's No Child Left behind didn't make the mark expected. It wasn't anything about local or federal level control that contributed to its failure; it was just that to get some convincing results of success in, they lowered standards considerably for the exams the children were expected to pass. The No Child Left Behind also fails because it has to. What use is a federal law that tries to push all the schools to do better, when it doesn't have any real power to make them better? So are a school system that is local and an education curriculum that the district decides on, the main culprit in all the nations woes?
Well, nowhere else in the civilized world is education left to the districts. And nowhere else, is the education curriculum decided by elected officials, and not education experts. That's what is happening in Texas; everyone on the education decision-making board is just an elected official, with little or no experience deciding on any educational subject. This way, they can just decide to cut anything out and bring anything in, for political leverage. What on earth is this country going to do, if the people who decide on our education curriculum aren't well educated in those subjects themselves? Let's do what France did - roll out the red carpet for excellent teachers, pay them like never before, and bring some uniformity into the school system from Miami to Anchorage to Hawaii, and then watch as our children do their best.