The issue of having educational standards set by a national committee encourages some people and frightens others. Richard F. Elmore and Susan H. Fuhrman, in The Governance of Curriculum, call local control of education a "myth" (p. 3) and describe in the first few pages the local, state, and national influences on education that are in place, and, they claim, always have been. They cite Managers of Virtue, a 1982 study by Tyack and Hansot that demonstrates that 19th and early 20th century public schools used a national network modeled on evangelical religious tradition (Elmore and Fuhrman, 1994, p. 3).
Today, many of the people protesting the imposition of national standards are those of the evangelical religious tradition as well as conservative political tradition. Their basis for objection to national standards is not a matter of what is set but a matter of who set it. The most common basis for unification against an arm of the federal government imposing standards on local schools is that the parents of the local school should be deciding for themselves what their children learn. The local school is supported by property tax money earned by local residents who want, therefore, to have a say in how their money is spent. Additionally, the politically conservative object on the basis of an additional federal government expense (to draft the standards) which is unnecessary, redundant, and potentially insulting in its implication that the local standards are insufficient or irrelevant. President Lyndon Johnson launched ESEA (the Elementary and Secondary Education Act), and federal spending on education went from $478 million to $1.646 billion in one year. In the past 20 years SAT scores have dropped 35 points as per student spending has gone up from $3,393 to $5,314 (dollars adjusted for inflation). Yet, since 1972 the average teacher salary, adjusted for inflation, has risen only 3.5 percent (Farris, 1995, p. 1). This means the ...