This is synchronicity; just a little while ago I wrote a comment on kitchen table math about my subsidized farmer childhood.

(What **is** the history of farm subsidies, anyway? I talked to a sociologist at NYU who did a study of Midwest farmers who refused to take subsidies on grounds that they were government handouts… How organized were farmers? The farmers I knew were all pretty individualistic…. )

These days I think farm subsidies are mostly going to huge companies, right?

Anyway, scratch that.

You’re absolutely write re: organization. Parents get rolled because parents aren’t organized. And it’s damned hard to organize parents, too.

Parents get rolled for the same reason that farmers roll eaters: farmers are organized, eaters are not. Consequently, farmers take your tax money to not grow crops or to pile them up somewhere so you can pay higher prices at the grocery store. Woo-hoo!

While examples of states with good standards and tests are few and far between and difficult to maintain, the idea that the federal government is going to succeed at getting everyone to adopt high standards and keep them that way over time is completely naive.

I like you am frustrated with the glacial pace of reform in the states, but I’ll take it over the 1930s to 1996 federally induced stasis in welfare policy under federal guidance.

Speaking as a parent, I don’t see a lot of experimentation and innovation taking place in the states, national standards or no. I see a handful of interlocking NGOs funding startup programs featuring “teams of students working on projects” and schools “integrating technology into classroom learning”.

Which means the public pays for the SMART Boards after the seed money runs out.

College-educated parents also pay for the tutors who do the actual teaching after student teams fail to teach themselves how to factor a polynomial.

I don’t want to pay for SMART Boards (or tutors), but tant pis. Bill and Melinda have made the call.

As to the notion that “there is no national consensus on what constitutes a high quality education,” I don’t think that’s true where parents are concerned.

If you left it up to parents — only to parents, not to unions, ed schools, or policy elites — you’d find a very broad consensus that schools should teach the 3Rs in K-5 and a core curriculum in the liberal arts thereafter.

You’d also find probably 70% of the public wanting these subjects taught in a traditional, teacher-centered setting, with remaining parents preferring hands-on experiential learning in the John Dewey tradition.

The number of parents who truly want teams of students designing dog runs in middle school is quite small.

This is true of parents in Europe, too.

Sweden’s “Knowledge Schools” are another example of parents wanting transparent, direct instruction in core subjects.

Parents simply do not have a voice. Not at the state level, not at the federal level. The creation of national standards will not change this and nor will the failure to create or adopt national standards.

I was under the impression that a Congressional committee and some Senate oversight committees are the ones that do this. Since when does the public vote on defense spending, if not by proxy voting for a presidential candidate?