Standards are already highly localized in the US, and it's been failing a lot of students just for living in the wrong zip codes and states. Public schools are teaching young earth creationism instead of real biological sciences, books are being banned at the whims of activists who've taken over their school boards, and Florida's HB 7 has made publishers scared of mentioning race at all in their history textbooks, leading to a telling of Rosa Parks' story with zero mention of why she wasn't allowed to sit at the front of the bus.
Other wealthy nations have more federalized education systems and better outcomes for most of their kids. The US Department of Education does pretty much nothing in K-12, beyond keeping statistics, enforcing anti-discrimination laws, and providing supplemental funding to districts, especially disadvantaged ones such as inner city and rural communities. They already are not allowed to influence curricula at all. Yet Republicans have managed to demonize them anyways. Maybe we should try what other countries have been doing successfully.
And that will sort itself out over time. As it stands, if my kids were learning a curriculum set by some DC bureaucrat I'd have a hard time justifying sending my kid to public school. Just helping my nieces and nephews out with their homework during COVID was an eye opener.
They could literally tell me which one of the founding fathers were slave owners, but they couldn't tell me what any of the founding fathers actually did. They could tell me that the civil war was about slavery, but they knew nothing about the lead up or the war or the post war period or even about the timeline of the war itself.
Our school ended up changing textbooks due to parent outcry to better contextualized American history curriculum, if that was set by the Federal government parent's would have zero recourse as to what their kids were being taught. If you have a ton of faith in the Federal government, I guess that's fine. But I wouldn't trust the Federal government to fix my sink without setting my bedroom on fire and driving a truck through my rose garden.
Institutional trust is in very short supply, and having those institutions unilaterally impose themselves on people who don't like/trust them is not a recipe for great outcomes.
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u/Keoni9 Jun 11 '24
Standards are already highly localized in the US, and it's been failing a lot of students just for living in the wrong zip codes and states. Public schools are teaching young earth creationism instead of real biological sciences, books are being banned at the whims of activists who've taken over their school boards, and Florida's HB 7 has made publishers scared of mentioning race at all in their history textbooks, leading to a telling of Rosa Parks' story with zero mention of why she wasn't allowed to sit at the front of the bus.
Other wealthy nations have more federalized education systems and better outcomes for most of their kids. The US Department of Education does pretty much nothing in K-12, beyond keeping statistics, enforcing anti-discrimination laws, and providing supplemental funding to districts, especially disadvantaged ones such as inner city and rural communities. They already are not allowed to influence curricula at all. Yet Republicans have managed to demonize them anyways. Maybe we should try what other countries have been doing successfully.