Absolutely the role of the Federal government in education should ONLY be one small office--probably ten or twelve employees could handle it--to receive data from each public and private school in the country and homeschooled. Test scores, curriculum offered, graduation rates, college acceptance rates, etc. could be transmitted by computer from each school and organized by computer at the federal level to be a comprehensive data base.
Also college entrance requirements from each college and university in the country should be part of the data base.
That way, each school, and parents, would have access to data to compare the local performance with all other schools in their area and state and all other states.
Otherwise each state, and preferably each school district should be governed by their local school board and that board, parents, and teachers together would decide on curriculum, class size, qualifications of teachers, pay grades, and standards for promotion for kids and teachers.
Other than managing that central data base, the federal government should stay entirely out of it. Even participating in the data base should be voluntary, but any school and the community it represented would be at a severe disadvantage if they chose to opt out.
hmmmm and why do they need any of that and why pray tell is it any of their damn business?
They don't NEED it. But it would be an important and highly useful service that the federal government could legitimately provide in the interest of the general welfare.
How would any school district know how good a job its school board, administrators, and teachers were doing in education without some way to compare their progress with others? It would be a huge job for a local school to research changing entrance requirements, tuition, fees, etc. for every institution of higher learning so that they could counsel the kids on how to prepare and show them their options of where they might like to go. A central federal data base could collect and dispense that information effortless however, most especially in this high tech computer age.
The school that opted out of the system would have the complete right to do so, but would do so at the peril of parents avoiding that district or employers unwilling to locate in a community with a potentially inferior education system. As long as the school was in the data base and can show it is on a par with other school in the area and state and country, there is no problem. And it is a huge incentive to do the best job possible in education.
