Local school boards do have that control, but national standards need to be met or some local school boards would violate the Constitution with the standards they might vote for. We see this with the creationists all the time.

Rick Santorum seems to take great joy in demonstrating his complete lack of intelligence.

Only because the law makers don't give squat for the people.. They'd rather pocket the profits than pay for good teachers. Last week I ran upon a Teacher's College.. It was adjacent to Mickey D's hamburger college for Jr. high drop-outs. What was the difference between the two? The teacher's  college didn't require a criminal background check (I think it was one of those Santireddumb joint ventures)... (don't say joint' in the presence of a pseudo  christian you dummy!)..

You are going to throw rocks at me for saying it, but I'll still say it.

Public schools don't give anyone a decent education.  The training you need comes from trade school, seminars, and practical hands-on experience.  We get in-house training on every new job site and local OSHA and NEC revision every single day.

Steamfitters and electricians work very closely together.  I hook up and test steam lines, boilers and turbine connections, I hook up co-gens (they are jet engines that make hot wind, steam, and drive turbines) but it has to pass NEC as well as OSHA and Local Safety.

They don't teach that in public school.  In fact their trades programs are so bad I don't want to work with 3/4 of these guys. 

That is why some shops have "fink tags."  Put a black tag in his personnel box and that means he isn't working well with the crew, and put a red tag in there if you caught him in a safety violation.  Put a green tag in there if he was doing all things properly.  Fink tags come in sets of 60.  There are enough of all 3 color tags to tell about 20 people on that site.  Anyone who gets more than five red tags in a week gets the gate.  I have never gotten a red tag since I became a Journeyman.  I got a few as an apprentice.  Apprentices get more training.  Journeys with red tags don't.

The rest you keep in your pocket and throw them away once you leave the site.

If you went to a public school, you wouldn't have known that.

Government schools are a disgrace and it is being pointed out over and over everyday all over the country.

Teachers Unions are keeping people in jobs who surely need to be using a broom and mop on a floor instead of chalk on a chalk board.

The government is putting out little nerdlings who believe everything should be given to them, they are all equal and should not ever exceed above what the government wants, they should eat only what Michelle the big klunker who stuffs her face with the most exquisite cuisene tells them to its' ye ole "eat as I tell you not as I eat." 

The colleges are turning out numbskulls who believe the world owes them a living and they are zombies crapping in the streets, shoving drugs up their orifaces, screaming what the government tells them to and living in dung heaps and tents because they can't find jobs after they got their social degrees or what have you.

Stalin/Hitler all Dictators have always controlled the schools understanding that it will be the generations to come that they will have full control over and even purging the intelligencia, scientists, writers, thinkers, teachers, poets you name it.

Lady Darko

The old Department of Education proved that it was a cumbersome and ineffective beaurocracy that should have been disbanded.  To date, I have seen nothing to recommend it.

However, education to the secondary school level should meet specific standardized criteria.  I get very tired of seeing freshmen who must take remedial math because their high schools met DOE standards but failed to teach their students anything beyond middle school algebra. 

I wouldn't call education obsolete no matter how it's handled.  I do think we spend too much time and effort attempting to educate people who would otherwise rather not bother.  People learning is only limited by their lack of desire to learn.  HOWEVER--that education is financed through property taxes is one of the big reasons there are so many cuts and such a lack of funding.  We need to find a better and more effective way to finance our nation's education.  I think we'd do better to make schooling voluntary but totally free for those who want it across the board, including higher education.

I think our educational system has some serious problems. But I think home schooling has far more serious problems. Like raising a generation of socially inept, badly educated, fanatical hermits.