Education Reporter Laments 'Hodgepodge' from Lack of Federal Guidance of Education

The federal government knows best: Education reporter Sam Dillon again called for more federal control of schools in Thursday's "States Receive A Reading List: New Standards For Education," suggesting that state autonomy on education standards has resulted in a "hodgepodge" and was backwards and Third World:

The Obama administration hopes that states will quickly adopt the new standards in place of the hodgepodge of current state benchmarks, which vary so significantly that it is impossible to compare test scores from different states. The United States is one of the few developed countries that lacks national standards for its public schools.

Students whose families move from New York to Georgia or California, for example, often have difficulty adjusting to new schools because classroom work is organized around different standards. The problem has become worse, since many states have weakened standards in recent years to make it easier for schools to avoid sanctions under the federal No Child Left Behind law.

A December 2008 story by Dillon also cited chosen "experts" who looked down credentialed liberal noses on the "fantastically fragmented," "patchwork quilt" of American preschool education (translation: states being allowed to run their own schools, as opposed to having the federal government supervise).