Comments Elsewhere

“Yes, and I still support abolishing it. Either though you ignored the context that I wrote that in, are vouchers and testing not conservative proposals?”

Depends on what you take the content of conservatism to be, I suppose. If your aim is strictly limited government and a federal republic rather than a national bureaucracy, then no, these aren’t conservative proposals.

Vouchers aren’t the main focus of my concern here—although I will say that they amount to extending government money—and thus, government control—over private schools as well as state schools. There are good arguments to be made on both sides for whether the benefits to school competition still outweigh the costs in increased bureaucratic control and homogenization, but it certainly seems to me that the further away from local communities you place the locus of control (like, say, in the federal Department of Education) the worse it looks.

The “Good God, man,” though, is directed towards the notion that the federal power-grab through mandated “testing” is somehow a conservative notion. What “testing” means is a massive and unprecedented takeover of education by the federal government through Department of Education testing mandates. That is what Bush promised and that is what he delivered. Today the federal education bureaucracy is more powerful, exercises more centralized control over local school districts, and has a budget heading for the roof. You may say John Kerry would be just as bad or worse; fine, but no-one is claiming John Kerry is a conservative.

These are ideas that come from a recognizable Right-wing source—they are straight out of the educational playbook of the Kaiser’s Prussia. But that just goes to show that not all Right-wing ideas are conservative ideas. If you still think that these proposals are a good idea, fine; there are arguments to be made for them. But there are no arguments to be made for describing them as conservative proposals.