I'm sure the reason that the other countries with excellent education systems, refered to in the article, used a market to arrive at their current level of success... has this been done anywhere?

There has been a push, since the cold war for black and white thinking. Communism - Bad : Capitalism - Good. This country's approach to many things has been avoid "communism" in the form of government oversight/regulation (three naughty words?) and create a market to let participants regulate themselves... then special interests and lobbyists have loopholes and benefits written into law. The process eliminates oversight (substituting market forces) and creatings an uneven playing field, thus negating market forces. What you are left with is government handouts to groups and associationss with the most effective lobbying efforts. See our current financial mess.

There are somethings ideally suited to government, infrastructure happens to be one of them, and I would classify education as building the human infrastructure of this countries future.

A friend of mine once noted that the educational thinking of American conservatives/libertarians goes something like this: Our schools are failures. Our students routinely do worse from students from other countries, especially the European and East Asian ones. However, rather than model our educational system on the systems done elsewhere, we will totally abolish public education.

Lee Ratner:

A friend of mine once noted that the educational thinking of American conservatives/libertarians goes something like this: Our schools are failures. Our students routinely do worse from students from other countries, especially the European and East Asian ones. However, rather than model our educational system on the systems done elsewhere, we will totally abolish public education.

You mean like incorporate high-stakes universal testing?

Sure, if it's truly universal and not some useless and constantly downgraded curriculum written by politicians, and completely different from state to state. (Which is what we have now under NCLB).

But that, you know, would cost money, and decrease local control, making this idea a "left-wing" idea, I guess.

Conservatives looked at the private schools in this country and noticed that they, for the most partk, work -- they do a better job of educating that the public schools. Hence the call for vouchers and privatization.

You'll never get high stakes testing here. It's a GREAT idea, but it will never be succesful while various ethnicities can claim that any such test is culturally biased against them.

I don't know the solution, but does it have to be more socialism every time?

do you realize that government does not equal socialism... is our court system socialist?

I realize not all government is socialism, but one definition of socialism is that it occurs when the government owns the sources of production. When it comes to education, clearly the government does own the source of production.