The following comes from a December 11 Catholic Education Daily article by Adam Cassandra:
President Barack Obama signed into law the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) on Thursday, overhauling the No Child Left Behind legislation of 2002 that expanded the federal government’s influence in local education — a move that is “great news” for Catholic schools said The Cardinal Newman Society’s Dr. Dan Guernsey.
“Any time we can get the federal government to back off, even a little bit, from education, that is a good thing. Education belongs, under the principle of subsidiarity, as close to the parents and community as possible,” Guernsey, director of the Newman Society’s K-12 programs, said in an interview with EWTN News Nightly on Thursday night.
The new law bars the federal government from mandating that states adopt federal standards, such as Common Core, and keeps the federal government form offering incentives to states to adopt such standards. Instead, the individual states will be responsible for educational standards.
“Common Core is primarily about college and career, and we want to put foremost that [Catholic education] is about complete human formation,” Guernsey said in the interview with EWTN News Nightly. “That’s where effectively functioning, alive human beings make society better. And they certainly grow the Church, the seeds of the Gospel can take root in those deeply situated lives.”
The following comes from a December 10 USCCB press release:
The chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ (USCCB) Committee on Catholic Education, Archbishop George J. Lucas of Omaha, Nebraska, applauded President Obama’s signing today of the Every Student Succeeds Act into law.
“The Every Student Succeeds Act demonstrates that there is broad bipartisan agreement on restoring equitable treatment of private schools and ensuring that all children are afforded the education services, benefits, and opportunities they deserve, regardless of the type of school they attend,” said Archbishop Lucas.
This is good news, but as long as federal money keeps coming to local schools, the strings will return, under another guise.
Be careful what we wish for! We have a strong tradition of local control of education and a distrust of federal interference. Fine and good up to a point. Yet, education outcomes have to be a national concern if our country is going to compete in the global economy. We have the best universities in the world, but our elementary and secondary test scores lag a large part of the advanced countries. India’s and China’s top ten percent of high school graduates are more than all the high school seniors in the U.S. Even while keeping local control, there needs to be some degree of national standards for outcomes.
Crybullies Aren’t Just for College: On Corporations and LGBTQ Political Correctness
https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2015/12/16059/
Calls for “Safe Spaces” on campus don’t just threaten the future of academia. The same mindset seeks to silence dissent and respectful disagreement in business as well.
The problem, however, is that the weaponization of “safe spaces” to constrain and destroy those with dissenting opinions doesn’t just happen on campus. It is an under-recognized yet distressingly common event…
the norm has changed from the avoidance of politics and religion to a culture in which the failure to openly support key portions of the LGBTQ agenda can result in disciplinary action and, in the case of Brendan Eich and…
Crybullies Aren’t Just for College: On Corporations and LGBTQ Political Correctness
https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2015/12/16059/
– case of Brendan Eich and Mozilla, termination…
threat of poor performance reviews, denied promotions, and stunted career paths, they are achieving the same effect.
The force behind these new policies is the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index (CEI), which has ranked companies based on their commitment to LGBTQ…
– demands that companies incorporate specific workplace policies, and it penalizes corporations if anyone associated with them dares to dissent publicly…
publicly supporting the entire LGBTQ movement’s agenda is mandatory. If employees refuse to participate in a company…
Obama and the USCCB are supporting this bill? “WARNING WILL ROBINSON!”
Gravey:
It is is the general interests of the Church to support local autonomy for all schools, public and private.
The Federal Government should keep their nose out of education completely.
We do not need a Federal Dept of Education.
In accordance with the Catholic teaching of ‘subsidiarity’ – education is the responsibility of the State, Local Government, and Parents.
The USA spends more money on education per student than any other Country, yet our students rank 26th.
Mac, I agree with you in the abstract, but outcomes are not equal across the nation. Local control is what causes some states to provide almost no education at all – Mississippi? Local control is what allowed segregation by races. Local control is what wants to evolution from the science curriculum, and climate change, and … Local control is what some school boards use to lower test score thresholds so low as to be a joke. I lucked out because my local schools were great, but the next town over was a joke. Education is national priority. We are in a brain war with the rest of the world.