The push has always been about central control of education from the progressive socialist democrat ideology, Common Core, as it is now, and always has been about fundamental change, and what a great way to do this is with fundamentally changing how the young are educated.
History can show how this works from the 1930's and also how it was the foundation for the second world war. Establishing a mind set that cannot be altered.
An Education Freedom Index Calculator: An Important Measure of Central Control
By John Merrifield
This is a different online calculator than the School Choice Fiscal Notes Calculator I announced a few weeks ago. Both have been in the works for a long time. This must be the year of the school system index in the Chinese calendar!? In the course of making announcements of my just-completed, online Education Freedom Index (EFI) Calculator, I discovered that an UN-affiliated NGO (OIDEL — International Organization for the Development of Freedom of Education) is just about to release a Freedom of Education Index (FEI). Despite the very similar names, my EFI and OIDEL’s FEI measure very different things. The differences amount to another version of the huge, but often confusing, difference between “freedom from” (EFI) and “freedom to” (FEI).
For example, in the name of access to schooling, OIDEL’s FEI highly values price control. We’ll have to wait until the FEI release and eventual translation from the original French and Spanish into English before seeing if OIDEL’s FEI takes account of a possibly severe trade-off between “free” and diversity of the menu of schooling options. I will be pleasantly surprised if OIDEL’s mantra of “free and compulsory” just means some “free” school choices for everyone, rather than the more common demand for “free” choices only. And if it means the latter in OIDEL’s FEI, I’ll be pleasantly surprised if the FEI takes account of the just-described severe trade-off created by “free” only.
My EFI does take account of the connection between public-private co-payment of tuition and the quality of the menu of schooling options.
The EFI is described in considerable detail in an academic journal article. The two primary reasons for creating the calculator are that: 1.) School system centralization/ decentralization is a key policy issue. It is difficult to debate something that is not measured, so the EFI Calculator aims to provide website users an objective, relative measure (0 min, 100 max) of the degree to which the schooling options of their home country, state or province are centrally controlled, constrained, and influenced; that is government vs. market control of schooling options; and 2.) to provide the calculated EFIs as a public data set as a basis for estimating the impact of decentralization on key outcomes such as education system performance, economic growth and economic equality.
The public data set won’t exist until several school system experts have entered answers to the questions posed by the calculator. If you are expert in school system policy for a state, provincial, or national-level school system, please go to http://www.schoolsystemreformstudies.net/education-freedom-index.html ASAP, and answer the questions there for those school systems.
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