What is the problem?

There is one thing that people need to know about America's educational system, at least what it has been.  It was never a national issue until JFK used education to get himself elected.  He used the Sputnik incident to say that education needed reform.  Education had nothing to do with it.  The USSR had devoted all their resources to getting a satellite working for many reasons.  JFK said it was because our educational system was failing, and that HE would fix that.  It wasn't him who began the national takeover however it was LBJ, using the civil rights issues to interfere in education.

Our education system was actually the best in the world and every country was trying to imitate it.  Starting with LBJ politicians found that they could effectively use the issue to get themselves elected, Bush being one of most egregious.  Unfortunately, unlike Kennedy, he made good on his promise with NCLB, laying the foundation which became today's Common Core.

Thanks to all of these politicians calling for reform, most people now think our educational system is in shambles, a broken mess, which will result in our country's demise.  In reality if apples are truly compared to apples (meaning we cut out all the students the other country's don't test) we still beat virtually every country.  Not that there aren't problems, but most of those have come from all the messing that politicians, and courts, have done to it!

We don't have to totally throw out the system and start over.  We DON'T need Washington "experts" to take it over for us.  We need to return to what was one of the main things that made us great - the community owned school system.  Despite the fact that some were not as good as others, it still produced better educated students by far than any other system in the world, and was a major factor in making us great.

If Common Core is thrown out, it is not the end of the world!  Of course I believe we will be MUCH better off if we get rid of it and NCLB.  Of course to really do it right, we need to divide the big districts back to community-run organizations - removing federal and most state interference and begin to believe in government OF, BY, AND FOR the people again instead of doing it TO the people.