People need to wise up...

There is a serious problem with the public perception of education if they truly believe that the system of public education as a whole would benefit from Republican control.

Here are their main points on "improving" education in America:

• Holding teachers, administrators, and schools accountable by performing efficiency assessments and performance assessments annually to determine efficacy and tenure decisions using flawed data reports
• Emphasizing performance pay programs where teachers are paid based on their student performance (which begs the question who would ever voluntarily teach the lowest performing students?)
• Stripping teachers of their collective bargaining rights in order to close budget gaps created by offering private sector enterprises tax breaks - attacking union protections and tenure
• Utilizing standardized tests as the sole measurement of how effective a school is regardless of outside factors that affect student learning (poverty, health care, unemployment, lack of counseling and social work, etc)
• Privatizing education by turning to charter schools where there is less financial accountability and mixed academic results - what's their motive?  It's not for children
• Turning teachers into the scapegoats of society's inability to handle the chronic problems that a growing lower class brings - oddly enough, caused by large corporate malfeasance and meltdowns
• Turning schools into service industries by shifting accountability of student failures away from parents and students and placing all the blame on individual teachers using flawed data reports
• Never once addressing the problem of teacher attrition and problematic continuity and consistency as teachers leave the classroom from year to year - they don't have a solution to the shortages of educators in high-need areas, only more finger pointing

Show me a Republican who understands the nature of high-need education and can actually reasonably address these issues I see and deal with on a daily basis and perhaps I'll reconsider the hopelessness of the Republican party in terms of educational policy.