There is a law on the books now that states school property may not be used by anyone intent on overthrowing the government. SB 1322 would delete the requirement that an individual or organization wanting to use the school property is not a Communist action organization or Communist front organization. The bill would also strike the law that a public school or community college employee may be fired if he or she is a member of the Communist Party, and the bill would also strike the law that prohibits a teacher giving instruction in a school or on public school property from teaching communism with the intent to indoctrinate or to inculcate in the mind of any pupil a preference for communism.
My source was
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=58061

“Teaching” may seem to many like just passing on that stuff to the captive audience.

Additionally, to the extent that the federal government has infested education with benchmarks, over emphasis on test scores and artificial “performance” measurements tied to funding, public education in America has shot craps.

Common sense tells me that if left to private enterprise where the best performers are successful, everyone wins. This goes for education as well as any other unnecessarily huge bureaucracy created by the government. We live in a free market society, privatize education completely and watch the quality of education sky rocket.

Oddly, I think the best models are already there, in our past, in the old English and Italian models of the university, the ones we dumped for credentialism and myopic specialization. If you want to know what that model sounds like, go watch Kenneth Clark’s “Civilization” or read Jacques Barzun’s “From Dawn to Decadence,” you won’t be disappointed.

It is entirely possibly to engender a profoundly thoughtful young man or women on a shoestring budget, and with virtually no gadgets or audio-visual toys–or any of the other things the educrats and their unions claim are part-and-parcel of the modern classroom.

Old textbooks? Good, introductory Algebra hasn’t changed much in a very long time, the older the better, you can get them cheap and they are probably, no certainly, superior to any of the post-modern crap churned out by the textbook companies. Same goes for most history and literature books, with a few exceptions, you’re much better of with something closer to 1900, than to 2000. Almost all of the fundamentals were covered a long time ago, and what is new can be gleaned from good magazines and single books. Oh, and always, always choose books written by a single author over a textbook; “textbooks” are, by-and-large, crap, a hodge-podge of poorly written, ludicrously overpriced, phony consensus on a subject. Individual authors often have verve and vision, style and argument, a clear and purposeful point of view; textbook bore young minds to distraction and enrich the worst aspects of the education racket. Get a library card and use it; the world of ideas is a few blocks away and will remain an old friend for the rest of the child’s life. One of my great “shivers-down-the-spine” moments was walking into the main branch of the New York Public Library.

I have many highly educated friends and family, but the one friend who really stand out works as a waiter, half the year, in Napa valley, and spend the rest of the year traveling. He reads for the love of ideas, for the sheer joy of better understanding what he considers to be a miraculous universe. He knowledge of everything from Italian Opera (he is a regular at all the great opera houses) to the flora and fauna or northern Alaska (he is an avid outdoorsman and conservationist, living for months at a time in remote deserts and forests), to the history of ancient Jerusalem and Greece, is both compelling and invigorating. He is one of the few men, who, when all incentive is taken out of it, and all compulsion is removed, will read Tolstoy or Stendahl for the nothing more than the personal delight of being in the intimate presence of a fine mind. This humble waiter is a man in full, a civilized man, an educated man with whom older children would undoubtably blossom and flourish. He applied at one of the teacher programs here in Los Angeles; I warned him what he would endure. He lasted one week. He is headed for the French wine country to spend the autumn reading Balzac and Rabelais in the original, you lost LAUSD.

THE TEACHERS? UNION HAS ONLY BROUGHT ABOUT MORE MEDIOCRITY TO THIS COUNTRY AS IN FORD-GMC AND ANYTHING TO DO WITH SOCIALISM START REWARDING THE TEACHERS FOR WHAT ACHIEVE NOT FOR WHAT THEY DONT ACHIEVE.

UNIONISM IS ONLY AS GOOD AS THE WORST WORKER..