September 14, 2010 | By Bethany Murphy

In Education, Local Solutions for Local Schools

As America’s young people return to school this month, the federal government is becoming more involved than ever in their education.

As Heritage Foundation experts Lindsey Burke and Jennifer Marshall explain, the Obama administration is forcing states to adopt “voluntary,” one-size-fits all standards, despite fresh research showing that top-down standardization does not yield results. The administration is pouring more money than ever into the federal Department of Education, ignoring additional research affirming that more money leads to more problems.

In September of last year the administration published the Common Core State Standards Initiative, which amounts to yet another attempt by the federal government to control education requirements nationwide. This “voluntary” program is linked to Title I funding, a source of income nearly every school district in the nation relies upon, thus ensuring national (and often involuntary) participation.

Simply adopting national standards will not ensure an improvement in performance. Burke and Marshall show that “the relationship between existence of standards and strong educational outcomes is not clear. While the countries that outperform the United States on international tests have national standards, so do most of those countries that score lower than the U.S.”

Worse, national standards might lower the bar for well-performing schools. A Heritage Factsheet on the subject states that “the rigor and content of national standards would tend toward the average among states, undercutting states with higher quality standards like Massachusetts, California, and Virginia.”

The Obama administration has launched a new grant program, Race to the Top, whose funding is contingent upon states implementing these standards. Many states balked at losing control of their education standards for a one-time payout and declined to enter the program. Another state, New Jersey, lost out on the funding due to a single mistake in the 1,000 page application. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie famously blasted the federal bureaucrats that cost his state the $400 million grant. This same bureaucracy is now responsible for the education of tens of millions of America’s youth.

Even though the United States spends three times as much on education today as in the 1970s, there has been little to no improvement in graduation rates and academic achievement. A new Heritage Factsheet asserts that “states should be freed from burdensome federal education mandates and have greater flexibility to direct education resources, targeting resources more efficiently to local needs.”

Local solutions are the key to empowering schools, administrators, parents and students towards a better future.

Heritage Work of Note

• During the Carter administration, America fostered a spirit of compromise and accommodation toward enemies like the U.S.S.R and Iran. This soft foreign policy led to foreign aggression, such as the Iranian hostage crisis. As Heritage expert James Carafano points out, this policy was reversed under the Reagan administration. Reagan “committed to a policy of ‘peace through strength.’ And, even before he put his plan into action, our enemies began to worry.” This strong foreign policy did not cause war; rather, it led to peace. Unfortunately, rather than learning from the past, President Obama has decided to promulgate a policy similar to Jimmy Carter’s, which can only lead to foreign encroachment.

• In June, President Obama declared to the nation that this season would be the “Summer of Recovery.” The White House website started Recovery Blog to showcase how the economy was leaving the recession behind. Unfortunately, as Heritage Distinguished Fellow Ernest Istook explains, “headlines told a different and more convincing story than Obama’s team could spin: Enormous spending and deficits. Unemployment high and long-lasting.” Even though the facts disagreed, the Obama administration has tried to maintain the “Summer of Recovery” spin, but Americans are not buying it.

• Political strategists have lately forecast that the Democrats will probably lose their solid majority in Congress in the November elections. According to Nile Gardiner, the director of Heritage’s Margaret Thatcher Center of Freedom, even liberal media outlets like the Washington Post are predicting political disaster for Obama come November. This development proves just how fed up the American public has become with the left’s policies and how strong the conservative response has become.

• Unions have traditionally represented workers in the private sector. However, as Heritage labor expert James Sherk argues, unions have switched their emphasis: most union members now are employed by government. These unionized government workers, who already receive higher salaries than private-sector workers, are now clamoring for even more pay increases. These increases, of course, come out of the taxpayers’ wallets and will ultimately result in tax hikes.

• Peter Orszag, the former White House budget official, recently wrote in The New York Times that tax increases were the way to unwind the large federal deficits. Heritage Vice President Michael Franc broke down this analysis on National Review Online. According to Franc, Orszag really said that “a permanent, multi-hundred billion dollar tax increase hangs over every American taxpayer like the sword of Damocles precisely because President Obama and his allies in Congress used up all the potential savings from two of the big three entitlement programs — Medicare and Medicaid — to pay for Obamacare.”

In Other News

• Citizens of several states, including New Hampshire and Delaware, go to the polls today for primary elections with potential national consequences.

• A federal judge has declared that the military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy is unconstitutional.

• Cities are beginning to use “trash police” to fine individuals who do not recycle appropriately.

• President Obama’s tax and regulatory policies are destroying the growth of small businesses and stopping the economic recovery.

• A University of Michigan study reveals that higher-income households are spending less and slowing economic growth because of uncertainty about high taxes.

• Charles Krauthammer explains why the Palestinian Authority is holding up the peace process in the Middle East.

Bethany Murphy is a writer for MyHeritage.org—a website for members and supporters of The Heritage Foundation. Nathaniel Ward, Amanda Reinecker and Andrew Vitaliti, a Heritage intern, contributed to this report.

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The following is from Eagle Forum.org. The link below may not work, but if you’d like to read the rest, please go to www.EagleForum.org.

Common Core Standards For Public Schools: A Bad Idea

Having taken over major parts of the banking industry, the mortgage industry, the auto industry, the college student-loan industry, and the health-care industry, the Obama Administration is now taking over the $600 billion public-school industry with taxpayers’ money from the Stimulus package. The White House concedes that “stimulus” is a negative word and avoids its use because it obviously didn’t stimulate jobs, but Stimulus dollars will stimulate the takeover of our children’s minds under Common Core Standards, the moniker for forcing national curriculum standards on all public schools.

Read column (with additional links) online.