(Guest post by Greg Forster)
In Death Becomes Her, a powerful sorceress offers Meryl Streep a potion that will make her immortal and eternally young. There’s this long, tense scene where she hesitates over whether to drink it. Does she want to live forever? Is she tampering with powers she doesn’t understand? Then she drinks it and there’s a special-effects sequence. Then the sorceress dramatically intones, “And now, a warning.”
Streep’s eyes bug out. “NOW a warning?”
That’s the only thing I could think of when I saw this, the latest chapter in the Fordham Institute’s ever-twisting pretzel of attitudes about national standards.
For as long as they can get away with it, they ignore the question of whether national standards will, once they’re created, inevitably be captured by the blob, and remade in the blob’s image. What little they do say is empty of substance and easily shot down by the application of a little logic.
Then as soon as it’s clear the federal government steamroller has succeeded in ensuring that all states will be dragooned into adopting its “voluntary” standards, Fordham comes out with this big solemn think-piece about how we need to consider the important question of how we can ensure the standards aren’t captured by the blob.
Hey, guys – what if we can’t ensure that?
I guess it’s too late to ask that question now.
Jay P. Greene's Blog 
Yeah, well… No one seems to be tackling Congress over this mess. That seems to be the only hope for stopping the “train wreck”
Verbal warnings won’t work. Time to take some legislative action!
http://concernedabouteducation.posterous.com/time-to-stand-up-to-the-national-standards-ag
Here’s the “warning” from The Foundry. Take head!
Instead of moving toward a system of rigid national standards, which would represent an unprecedented federal overreach into education, states should empower parents with information about school performance and increase transparency about academic achievement. And ultimately, parents should be able to use that information to choose a school that meets their child’s needs.
We know what works in education, and it begins and ends with parents–not the federal government.
Need some inspiration?
[speaker on for this one – love the lyrics]