>>I agree that not everybody can send their kids to a $50K per annum private school, which risks elite Sneech behaviors and disparity.
>In NJ, public school costs/non special needs student/year range from $8K-$43K.
>Special needs kids costs are insane. A couple of kids could go through Yale for the annual cost of educating one special needs kid in NJ.
>The public school system just doesn't work anymore.
>The reasons are numerous, but the first step is to acknowledge it.
>The next step is to remove all federal funding and get the feds - and their mandates- out of the picture.


>The notion that someone in Washington DC can set educational policies for someone in Oklahoma is whacky.

I don't think so. You do that and you'll have schools in Texas refusing to teach evolution and other southern states refusing to call slaves what they were (slaves) - seeing how this already happens to some degree it's not like a guess. It would seem that the feds need to set some guidelines and requirements and the states should then expand on those to offer more - not less (or stupid incorrect things based upon ideology vs science and facts).
A few years ago (I think it was 2009 or 2010) in Hawaii when the state ran out of money one of their 'solutions' to budget crisis was to cut funding to the schools - so what they did is instead of having the kids to to school 5 days a week - they went just 4 days a week!!!. So their solution for being to stupid to budget money properly was to rob all the kids of 20% of their education - which to me seems crazy as you're sort of propagating the stupidity further by not teaching the kids. Yeah don't think I want the states having too much control here - and hey it's not that I'm against states rights - but sometimes there is a need for the feds to be running the show to set proper standards, and in this case - assuming you don't have someone like Betsy DeVos running the show, I pick the feds over the states.