The Republican Party, Northern Industrialists and corporate powers aligned under Abraham Lincoln ensured that states could no longer defy the national Leviathan by virtue of their “Civil” War victory. In addition, state politicians and organizations are very much paid-off by the Washington class. Entities that once would have to rely on states now go to D.C. The fact that Senators are not sent by the individual state legislatures has something to do with it too. The Constitution only means what those in power say it means and power rests in D.C.

If anything, I understate the totalitarian trajectory. Your lack of concern for centralized power only reinforces my points.

No Child Left Behind, as controversial and provocative as it is – stands toe to toe and in many ways surpasses anything that the Clinton Administration did in regards to educational reform. Please note that both of the current presidential candidates have their educational policies based on NCLB rather than the Clinton era 100,000 teachers rhetoric.

What of the unions and the ideology that has a relative stranglehold on education and who’s intransigence has not only created the need for educational alternatives but have blocked such community based drives for charter schools, for example from coming to fruition based on the demands from parents for alternatives to their failed public schools?

With education as with economic matters certain people’s assumptions and biases allow them to look past where the problem really resides and instead go after their usual suspects.

Seems to me you are making too much of the question of the OP. OK, so you don’t want the federal government involved in education. This isn’t the main point of the comment. OP was asking what the Republicans might have to say about education going forward.

The federal government has no real power in these matters anyway. If states don’t like what the feds are suggesting, why do they follow along? They refuse to stand up for their rights under the Constitution, so they get what they deserve. It doesn’t seem to me that states or even most local districts deserve any great praise for the quality of eduction in their jurisdictions, but of course that doesn’t give the federal government an implicit right to impose despite what might be the best of intentions.

What do you mean by ‘conservative’? And what are they conserving? A true conservative would be concerned and outright hostile to any government creation labeled a “powerful national institution”.

You do not see that it is nationalist government causing the worst of problems?

How arrogant it is of you to believe that

1) the certainty of physical factors and interactions in the study of natural sciences could be transferred to the social science of educational management;

2) that your positivism justifies using national government power.

You advocate national power because you believe that the dictator (the US Government) will express your values. Don’t forget that Stalin had Trotsky killed- even though Trotsky shared the same views.

You and the Washington educrat establishment should be stopped in the name of liberty.