THE MYTH OF LOCALLY- CONTROLLED SCHOOLS
We need to understand that our public schools have not been locally controlled for decades . It does us no good if parents spend time , money , and energy winning school board seats to find they will not have any significant lasting impact .
Many conservative leaders do not understand this , but school districts must follow thousands of state and federal mandates . Over the last thirty years , state and federal education departments centralized almost all policies regarding teacher credentialing , testing , textbook selection , academic standards , bilingual education , special education , and even the construction of school facilities . Unelected state and federal bureaucrats are the ones who decide education policy in America today , not school boards and certainly not parents .
Today , school board members ’ decisions have a limited impact and are generally choices among the options created by state or federal laws . While conservatives slept over the last three decades , we lost control of our local schools to liberal state and federal school bureaucrats . The left isn ’ t solely to blame . It involved a coalition of many groups , including teacher unions , Democrats , school board associations , the liberal Republican establishment , and the business establishment .
Yes , the United States Chamber of Commerce and other national business groups played a key role in pushing hundreds of bills over the last thirty years that dramatically centralized education policy into the hands of the Department of Education in Washington , D . C . This bureaucracy was created in 1979 due to a campaign promise made by Jimmy Carter to the teacher unions , who , in turn , threw their support behind him . Since that time , the Department of Education has massively grown in size and power at the expense of local school boards and parents .
Remember Goals 2000 ? One of many massive federal programs that centralized education policy in Washington , D . C ., it was enthusiastically supported not just by the left but by establishment Republicans , including both Bush presidents and the U . S . Chamber of Commerce . They claimed centralizing education policy into the hands of liberal bureaucrats in Washington would improve our education system . It did just the opposite because it destroyed local accountability .
Today , America ’ s students are outperformed by students in Third World countries . We have a failing education system , so employers hire thousands of foreign workers . American students can no longer read or write at a world-class level .
Nonetheless , in the 1990s , I thought I could improve our education system by helping to organize a slate of over fifty school board candidates in my county . As a result , more than twentyfive conservatives won office , and in three school districts , conservatives took majority control .
Today , thirty years later , I cannot say this made any difference . These conservative school board members encountered state and federal mandates everywhere they turned . Many of them spent most of their time fighting recall
“ Unelected state and federal bureaucrats are the ones who decide education policy in America today , not school boards and certainly not parents .”
efforts and lawsuits launched by the teacher unions ( which have the funds to harass conservative school board members full time ), not to mention the media ’ s almost daily attacks upon them . Indeed , nearly all of them retired within a few years or were removed by a teacher union puppet in subsequent elections .
As far as I know , this was the largest sweep of conservatives to school boards perhaps in the last sixty years , but you would never know that by observing these same school districts today . Like most school districts in America , they continue to follow the left-wing agenda without fail .
A classic example was the Vista School District in northern San Diego County . Conservatives won three of its five seats , and one of the policies they championed was to allow teachers to introduce evidence critical of evolution . At no point did they try to ban the teaching of evolution ; they supported freedom of inquiry on this issue . The left and its media allies went ballistic , and for the next two years , that ’ s all they would talk about . Board members were recalled , lawsuits were filed , and in the end , conservatives accomplished little . Vista was back to its unionapproved , anti-parent policies within a few years . Today , they ’ re no different from any other school district dedicated to indoctrinating children to be good little socialists .
RENEWANATION . ORG 35