quoting the article:
>> By far the most draconian is the provision that by 2014, 100% of > students at any public school must be proficient in reading and math on state-developed tests, or the school faces a takeover.
>
Woj replied
>
> I am far from endorsing any Bush gang policies, but is it not the case
> that local control of schools as at the roots of the less than stellar
> state of the US education? Local control means:
>
> - dependence on local property tax, which creates gross inequality in
> school funding;
> - the ability of wacky special interest groups to infuse school
> curriculum with religious bullshit and similar locally popular nonsense;
> - the absence of standard curriculum, which creates the need for- and
> legitimation of- standardized testing, which arguably is as bad, if not
> worse, than no formal education at all.
>
> In that context, a state takeover is a good thing because it reduces the
> local control of education.
>
> Wojtek
Except that in context of the rest of the article, the points are that:
1) Takeover in such cases will mean reversion to the most reactionary type of education - a teaching entirely by rote, entirely to test, with no development of thinking skill. The point of such takeovers is not to have state run schools, but to make the schools intolerable so people take theri vouchers and go to private schools
2) the standards are such that no, or almost no school will be able to meet them - so it is basically the destruction of all public education
3) private schools, including those accepting vouchers, are not subject to any of these standards or even required to give their students any particular tests - so all the problems you attribute to local control are ten times worse with privatization.
The key is that this is not a conversion to a replacement of local schools with state schools. It is a replacement of local schools with virtually unregulated private schools. It is the last step of the ongoing efforts of the extreme right to destroy public education in the U.S. - which have already achieved a great deal.