Mike Umphrey, an AP English Teacher in Polson, Montana, (and a loyal Flypaper reader!) offers??a great response to my post from a few days ago:
My main reaction tends to be "Bah, humbug."I don't believe there is much of a conservative case to be made for any centralized DC-based education initiative. Cities and towns are perfectly capable of running schools.
However, as a classroom teacher I could certainly use access to excellent materials available free online. I would like to be able to send my writing students who have trouble with something such as parallel structure to a flash based tutorial, with a built-in assessment that could be configured to report to a data base so I could track individual progress. I could use dozens of such mini-lessons. I'm creating them myself, but good grief. Why are such things locked up in proprietary sites or available in low-quality and fragmented ways due to efforts of people such as myself, in a multi-billion-dollar publicly funded public service?
Most materials available free are not high quality. Most materials available from proprietary operators could also be improved. And in my field-the humanities-most materials have a strong liberal bias.
Getting the basic knowledge of the world needed by young people available free online in formats useful to teachers and homeschoolers would centralize information creation and dissemination while leaving decision-making dispersed. That would be reasonably conservative.
More ideas? Send them along.
