Welcome back non mooch. Glad to see your post. I completely agree regarding privacy issues. As well, the school records thing always bugged me. I understand certain information about the student is helpful to teachers and administrators but the amount of information kept and accessed and assessed is ridiculus. Further, I disagreed with the

author on the importance of knowing the students ' IQ. 1st IQ assessments are not that accurate and 2 nd, performance and intellectual success is based on many factors. To take the authors argument further, we would then need to know the teacher's IQ. But does this give an indication to how well she teaches? So many other factors are critical.

Studies have continually shown that the #1 best indicator of student progress isn't grades, testing, teachers, or money. It's engaged parents. ANYTHING that reduces the role of the parent in education is going to cause more problems than it could possible solve. Whether that is advocating a teaching method which prevents parents from helping their children with homework (Common Core) or denying parents full access to the classroom or attempting to mandate attendance at kindergarten and pre-kindergarten (the so-called "it takes a village" mentality), all of these attempt to reduce or eliminate the critical parental role in education. If you get down to brass tacks, so does public funding of education really because you introduce a third-party payer problem.

Get with me into my Wayback Machine when I was a student teacher at a run-down school in Detroit. The school had no one to teach the "Special Ed" kids, so the newbie got the job. I quickly realized that I wouldn't be able to teach these children according to the lesson plan so I taught them instead as follows. No lining up. Trying to get them to line up was a clown's fire drill. Taught them to know which bus to get on. Taught them to figure out when to get off the bus. Taught some to plink out a tune on the ancient upright in the class. Didn't try to keep them quiet. The principle would have failed me on my evaluation, but was so desperate to have a "teacher" in that class that she gave me a minimally passing grade. I was told I had to stick to the lesson plan! The lesson plan? I might just as well tried to teach those kids in Arabic.It was then I realized that school teaching was not for me.
On another note: Mozart and Beethoven: Mozart was a greater talent, but Beethoven worked harder at it and was the greater composer.

They only encroached due tot he greed od the state and local government thinking they were going to get money for nothing. EVERY FEDERAL PENNY has a string attached.

While I agree with your premise and your analysis, NMA, getting the federal government out of the educational business is no longer possible. So much of the funding now comes from the federal government that extraction of federal government interference is no longer possible. Even universities like mine that try to avoid governmental entanglement cannot do so completely. Along with the enticement of the federal carrots comes the tangled web of government oversight and control. One such unwanted interference comes via dictation of certain outcomes along with students' loans, which now cannot be obtained through private sources. One of the first things that President Zero did was to eliminate all competition for college loans.

Easier said than done. One thing that is obvious is that the Feds almost never give up control once they obtain it. The Department of Education was established in the 70's under Jimmy Carter. The educational system has steadily declined ever since but if you suggest abolishing The Dept of Education you are labeled as being against education.

Thank you.
This brought me back to the time when at the ripe old age of 8, my parents moved our family from a relatively advanced school system in Princeton, IL. to a very rural school where there were multiple grades in one room.
I ended up suffering through third grade once, fourth grade twice, fifth grade THREE TIMES and sixth grade twice. Suffice it to say that by the time that I was launched into 7th grade in an advanced district, you could stick a fork in me.
Allowing the intelligent to advance and allowing those who need teachers to remain behind is the answer to the "problem".

"The purpose of a university should be to make a son as unlike his father as possible"
- Woodrow Wilson

Its still the purpose of federal government in education, to move the son as far to the left from the father as they can. The only reason it was limited to college back then is they had no power over k-12.

One of the problems is the idea that education is one size fits all. Of course another one is that our education system was designed to put out non-thinking workers - see Dewey etc..

I agree with the tenor of this article. It made me think local school boards should buy into some independent but widely-recognized standard, like ABET but for grade school, and then they could put this on students' diploma/transcript.

If we went that far, the next step would be some type of privitization of schools. The crux of the problem IMHO is if you're not happy with it you have to literally make a federal issue out of it. If people just bought education like other services they'd just find another provider that worked for them.

Just stating government and education in the same sentence says it all. They do not mix well at all. Unless of course you say our education system is not interfered with by our government. But you can' say that.

That's a great point. I really miss programs like bright ideas, where exceptional children were allowed to be exceptional for 1 day every other week, with other kids like them. I was offered a chance to be in this group but my mom thought the extra work load would be too much for me. That was the first of many times she's held me back from my full potential. But she did her best. All I can do is try to do better for my kids. And I can definitely see the gravity of the govts involvement in my son. Poor guy hates school and he's only in 2nd grade. Its sad how the kids can see righttthrough it but are powerless against it because they don't know anything else.I keep my kids in the know.

It is exactly correct that the federal government constitutionally has no role in education. Public or private. But taking the 30,000 foot view of the matter it is interesting that initial federal policy actually recognized and encouraged the local nature of education. The original public land system created the layout of Townships and Ranges with at least one and often two of the thirty-six sections designated as "school" sections. The anticipation was that as the nation grew and moved west and new States were created from the Territories, that local communities would have some dedicated local land for local schools.

Now this system worked fine in the east (with Ohio as the first "public land" state entered in 1803), as you get to the far west and using my favorite Nevada as the example, we have these apparently random sections (a mile on a side) out in the middle of nowhere and even with some half way up the flank of a steep ass mountain range. BUT, at least these "school" sections are administered by the State which is a little bit of a reprieve for a State that is 87% "owned" by the federal government.