The School Board''s new policy reflects the spirit and intention of the state''s original physicshomeworkassistance law allowing provisional custody in the first place, an issue involving the legal status of children whose parents are divorced. Board member Catherine Davis, chairwoman of the board''s Policy Committee, said parents or custodians with provisional custody agreements that are not court-ordered by the beginning of the next school year will have to take their children out of the school they are attending. For the last several years, homeschooling has been the fastest growing educational alternative in the country. Estimates of its growth rate typically range from 15-25% annually. Homeschoolers are notoriously difficult to count, however, the National Homeschooling Research Institute believes that currently 1.2 million children homeschool today. While this constitutes only about 2% of all school age children, it’s more than 20% of those outside the government educational system. And, with a 20% annual growth rate, another quarter million children will join the homeschooling movement this year.

currently so strong that it may well leave a number of listeners wondering why such an obviously needed and beneficial reform wasn''t undertaken a long time ago. But the fact is that the effort to establish educational standards has always been an uphill fight in this country. In light of these circumstances, it is useful to examine why Americans have so vigorously resisted educational standards over the years. The history of such resistance physicshomeworkassistance suggests that there are three factors in particular that have made standards such a hard sell: a commitment to local control of schools, a commitment to expansion of educational opportunity, and a commitment to form over substance in the way we think physicshomeworkassistance about educational accomplishment. All three of these factors, which I treat below, can be traced in large part to our preference for one particular purpose of education:

In that year, which was some 40 years after the start of a massive effort by reformers to consolidate districts into larger administrative units, there were about 120,000 individual school districts in the U.S. This meant that on average there were only two schools per district. Now, that is really local control. Even now, after consolidation has continued for another 60 years, we still have about 15,000 separate school districts -- each with primary control over financing, staffing, and setting curriculum standards for our schoolsCertainly state governments have taken steps over the years to assert greater control over these matters in K-12 schooling, and even the federal government has made tiny and tentative moves in this direction. But all these efforts have been undertaken in the face of enormous resistance by local communities, which have vigorously fought to preserve the autonomy of their schools.

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