Federal funding for education is important, but, it does not allow the government the right to control the learning experience.
The idea behind the federal funding of education is to bring additional monies to schools with low level budgets because the population provides for a disparity of local taxes.
Example:
North Dakota has fewer people and students than California. So, the tax income to the state is far less than California. The federal government seeks to bring additional funding to states with smaller populations. The reason this was once a model for federal funding is because it is just as expensive to educate a child in North Dakota as in California. So, the federal treasury picks up the slack and allows equity in spending throughout each state.
Where the Secretary of Education becomes involved in learning is to target the problems states are having in educating their children. That is usually decided through standardized testing to exhibit how children are achieving in learning in school. Where there are problems in learning, the Secretary of Education has to act as a problem solver to bring better learning to these schools.
And standardized testing didn't occur whereby the children were educated to take the test. The standardized testing was a diagnostic tool to find where the problems existed. The ONLY standardized testing that actually were used for student performance were the college board tests; PSAT and SATs. Back in the day, we only took these tests once, not every month in our junior and senior year.
I always saw the multiple attempts at college board tests as cheating. I was astounded when my oldest son stated he wanted to take the test three times to better his scores. I told him I thought that was cheating. He said, "But, Mom everyone does that these days." Three times he took the college board tests. I couldn't believe it. Amazing.
We need a parent uprising and remove these tests from the hands of states.
