When the silly federal government wasn’t meddling in local schools they could avoid teaching evolution. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epperson_v._Arkansas
They could keep people with dark skin complexions in separate but equal schools. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Board_of_Education
With less federal intervention you are resoundingly correct that the academic circulum will represent the local community.
Could they? Only with the consent of the parents.
You are actually highlighting the OPs point. Government bureaucrats made a crazy ruling and people with actual skin in the game had to go along with it.
You are just saying "Hold up hold up. Not those bureaucrats. You should be forced to listen to these other bureaucrats instead".
There are currently countless inner city schools that utterly fail at educating students to a reasonable level.
California with its immense wealth, it's progressive views, and some of the most intelligent bureaucrats has one of the worst school systems in the country.
> would soon resemble Sunday Schools
Why do you think that?
Parents want their kids to do well. They understand the scientific method is important for a wide range of careers.
Conservatives are on equal footing with progressives when it comes to science except for belief in evolution.
Would you find some schools refusing to teach evolution? Yes, but they would be in the minority even in deep red states. And even then the majority of those schools would still be teaching the scientific method. They would just drop evolution from the curriculum.
Why should the consent of the parents matter when designing the curriculum? If the parents in an area suddenly decides that they all believe the earth is flat, would you be okay with that being the science education?
And if a bureaucrat decides that flat earth theory must be taught to kids would you be ok with that being the science education?
It's the difference between a state run economy and a capitalist one. Of course the capitalist one is not infallible but it has been proven time and time again to provide better results over time.
Who would that be?
The US varies to a great degree from the top 10 states to the bottom 10 states, economically. Massachusetts is at $75,000+ GDP per capita, on par with Norway. Mississippi at the bottom is at $37,000, half that of New York, Delaware, Connecticut, Massachusetts. The gulf isn't nearly as wide as that of the EU ($70k Ireland vs $13k Croatia), however it's still a considerable difference.
How would one propose the Federal Government's massive bureaucracy manage such wide variances in prosperity when it comes to states & counties? Maybe a dozen large school system zones, each semi-locally managed, encompassing several states. Otherwise, the best option is for states and counties to retain large amounts of control over local education.
Of course there needs to be some local control, some variation to help the students succeed in the environment they'll actually live in (agriculture classes in Iowa, for instance), but the federal government has an important role to play in preventing local systems from falling very far behind and spreading knowledge about what works in comparable systems.
It's not an all-or-nothing proposition, and certainly it does require a lot of money and people and procedures. Education is complicated and critical to both the present and future functioning of society.
I believe it's an argument for financial subsidy, not an argument for large amounts of control transfer away from local and up the chain to some far away bureaucrat.
The system I'd envision would have large amounts of local state + county control/influence, Federal subsidy to boost poor states who lack the tax resources, and a certain number of Federal supervisory school agency zones that would coordinate with the states in that zone to keep results high and represent the Federal Government's money (the US tax payer's money in theory). The idea would be to stay away from having bureaucrats in DC directly telling people in Idaho how to operate their education systems or how to fix their local problems (the Federal school zone overseeing Idaho would operate more locally and would be accountable to the member states; these Federal zones or agencies would be partners with the states conceptually).