It's all on scale. Local school boards, local schools- like PA's very small local school system model- is ideal for public schools. Larger the school system becomes, the more bureaucratic, and less responsive to the people that live there- more responsive to its own institutional needs. Add in Feds imposing national control- you get the mess of political indoctrination currently going on in the schools. As well as the wildly expensive, failed policies that are efforts to socialize and train children while failing to hold parents accountable.
Agree. When schools are local, the local people feel ownership. When they feel ownership, accountability follows.
Local administrators feel ownership, too, when they aren't set upon by federal bureaucrats telling them to re-design the whole system according to the latest fad. (Remember the feds' first tip-toe into local ed, back when Sputnik went up? That gave us the "new math"-- trying to teach elementary-school children to calculate in base 8 before they were competent in base 10? How'd that work out?)
It's a canard that parents in failing systems are 100% of the problem. It's, also, a canard that they don't care about education. True, many black parents don't trust public schools (history says they shouldn't, after all.) But that doesn't mean they don't CARE.
In my experience, if educrats ever bothered to ask PARENTS about what their children should be learning, we'd never see students allowed to skate by without being able to multiply 6x8 without a calculator. Teachers would be expected to alert students to incorrect spelling and grammar-- with a RED PENCIL. Immigrant parents not proficient in English would ask the school to teach their children English, and as for "ebonics"-- trust me, that was NOT some "poor parents movement." Even if they don't speak standard English, parents want their children to learn it. "Ebonics" as a creole language is of interest to linguists. The only black people who'd ever heard of it before it was introduced into selected public schools were tenured educrats in universities (who all spoke "standard" English very well, thank you.)
[Sidebar Personal Experience: When I taught first grade I gave homework, every night. I don't believe first graders should get homework-- that should be reserved for second grade as a "rite of passage." Why did I give it? Because my PARENTS really wanted their children to have homework. Not only did they want homework, they wanted homework hard enough that their children needed their help to do it. Trust me, they CARED!]
Let's not forget the BIG ONE in dysfunctional school systems. Parents do not want their children punched, kicked, spit on, or URINATED on by other people's little thugs-in-training. They really don't care if violent students are expelled or just sent someplace else. What they do NOT want is those kids in their children's classrooms. If the miscreants wind up on the streets, well too bad.
Schools should respond to parents, and not just say, "Sorry, federal law prohibits that." That's what too many parents hear these days. Teachers and administrators hear that, too.
And, yes, I am old enough to remember when the NEA was a professional association, and not a quaisi-labor union, and they were
totally opposed to the federal government taking over education. My how times have changed!
Hmmm...did the Federal Department of Education ever find the cars they "lost"? As a taxpayer, I'm still wondering about that. As an educator, I'm still wondering how taxpayers buying automobiles for educrats benefits students.