Too Many Cooks, Too Many Kitchens? So, let's at least get rid of the UNCONSTITUTIONAL one!

Read this really good post from Fordham today ("Too many cooks, too many kitchens") in which Finn and Petrilli expound on the idea that, though many of us pine for "local control" in public education we're not only not getting it, we're often not getting ANY control because of the convoluted administration of schools.

Despite America’s romantic attachment to “local control of public education,” the reality is that the way it works today offers a worst-of-both-worlds scenario. On the one hand, district-level power constrains individual schools; its standardizing, bureaucratic, and political force ties the hands of principals, stopping them from doing what’s best for their pupils with regard to budget, staffing, and curriculum. On the other, local control isn’t strong enough to clear the obstacles that state and federal governments place before reform-minded board members and superintendents in the relatively few locales where these can even be observed.

It frustrates me to NO END that people today have apparently lost all touch with the concept of COMMON SENSE! (yes, I am yelling - it's just frustration - sorry - I'm going to put on the Christmas music again...that seems to calm me down...)

I mean, truly, people EVERYWHERE have lost touch with this little beheld phenomenon of the 21st century - common sense. Over and over again we see this concept missing, not only in everyday life (example: those people who literally sleep in tents outside a giant box store just to get $50 bucks off a gaming system they don't really have the money for, that they spend so much time on that they can't really exist in the real world, or hold down a job and as such still have to live in their parents' basement - or a community park) but everywhere in government.

Finn and Petrilli's argument that there is so much movement in the system that the system can't move is simply dead on. You would think it common sense that you don't go to a government that can't pay its bills with your hand out to pay for programming that isn't really needed and that will require so many new employees just to administer, that only a fraction of the actual money received will make it into the classroom to run the program you thought you needed to have in the first place.

ON WHAT PLANET ARE WE LIVING?

Oh, I know. The planet of, "the more money I bring in, and the more programs I am thought to develop/run, the more power over others I gain". In fact, this whole public education thing is nothing more than a game based on money and power anymore. The idea of how to help children learn is really only secondary to an administration that lumps that responsibility primarily on the backs of the poor teachers who are (for the most part) just treading water trying to do what they can to please not only their building administration, but the school board and THAT layer of administration as well in order to keep their jobs.

This fabulous game has always been played out in spades within higher ed and, sadly, it has trickled down (with all the America-hating, work-abhorring, PC-abounding, liberal nonsensical garbage) like slimy, fetid oil from a rusted out grease trap in a Kipps Big Boy, into every nook and cranny of the public school system that is supposed to be educating America's children to love and appreciate their country (according to Sam Adams and Thomas Jefferson)!

Finn and Petrilli are right! We must remove the layers of administrative blankets placed on schools - and not just CHARTERS - ALL schools. I say the first place to start is with the Feds!

Until someone can show me the Constitutional justification for that department - get rid of it! Keep Oklahoma's money home in Oklahoma and let us (through our school boards) help our schools use it to help Oklahoma's kids! But then again, this could never work, mainly because, as they say, "common sense isn't "common".