Home of Today's Common Sense

In considering the many articles on education, it would seem that much of the cost and workload of education comes from documenting the programs mandated by our State and Federal benefactors when they give us money. I recently read that it can cost as much as twice the benefit to administer it at the different levels of government. Perhaps it would be better to do away with State and Federal Funding with their accompanying mandates, assuming of coarse a equivalent reduction in tax at those levels.
I suspect that the resultant educational system, less responsive to the elites from on high and more responsive to local needs would be much more efficient.
Unfortunately much of this kind of thinking, which came to the forefront in the early 1960’s was discarded because of the perceptions about the author and the context it was advanced. The author of the “flat tax”, was not a Republican but Democrat, George Wallace. At the time he also aggressively advanced concepts of less federal power over education, which were at the time viewed as a way of preserving the racial separatism in schools.
Now the government (federal and state) are determining even the content of what is being taught as well as how. Some of this is resulting in the revision of history to make some feel better about themselves and to exclude thoughts that the elite do not like such as right and wrong. Then they make the proving that we are teaching those things very costly to us. Oh, how my idols Hopalong Cassidy, Roy Rodgers and Gene Autry would be frowning from their heavenly view about what mush is being fed to the little pards.
In my opinion, times have matured where local administration could manage best for their own children better without both the mandates and financial help. I would be willing to see local educational taxes rise so long as I could see the Federal and State direction on how to spend it removed. I say this even in the face of the squabbles going on now in Brownsville; because they are our squabbles and our responsibilities.
If we only had a clear and consistent view of what was being mandated, things would be better. In talking to different administrators I hear many different views of what State and Federal mandates require and just as many perceptions as to what the local interpretation of those mandates requires. Even a recent statement by the President was taken a multitude of different ways – He suggested that to graduate from school, one must be able to read and write at a certain level. The assumption made is that everyone must reach that level in 10 or 12 years. My assumption is that it may take longer than that for each to reach the same level; so it takes as long as it takes.
We need to take more responsibility for our own children now!