= new reply since forum marked as read
in his inauguration speech from which we get the "lovely" 
soundbite about - government BEING the problem. And that cutesy crap about "the nine most terrifying words in the English language" - 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help'." What a schmuck! What incredible damage that bastard did to our country, our society, our culture - the works. And he made sure it was always wrapped up all pretty and sparkly and sweet-tasting. Til some realized too late that the nice sparkly candy-colored "sugar" he'd been providing them to sprinkle all over their food at every meal was actually arsenic.
And in-particular, under RWR, the whole war on education was begun by none other than William Bennett. He was the Education Sec from Feb 1985 - Sep 1988. I remember my head almost exploding upon hearing him say he wanted to abolish the Education Dept. Click on this link and scroll down to "Political Viewpoints" and see for yourself who the godfather of school privatization was and really, what has happened to our school system since then:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Bennett
I hate this self-righteous SOB. 
What you see is all there is.
IF you know 3 facts and don't know another 5, the only facts that matter are the 3. This is a little human trait that is fed by confirmation bias, encouraged by confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is just a contributing feature of the system.
We also assume that if we like something about a person (say, his taste in clothes) that it's relevant to everything else (say, his IQ or how he treats small children). So the three facts you know might not be all that important. But the human brain still says, when it's trying to find a conclusion, that even those facts are important. We can call this the "halo effect." It works just as well with a fact you don't like--"He's a republican" or "She doesn't properly appreciate my child's unique gifts, she must be a horrible teacher and kick puppies for fun."
The rot in education started in the '50s and early '60s, unless we want to consider segregated schools "rot". It was, but that was rot of a different kind. By the mid '60s we started having all kinds of educational fads and trends trying to remedy problems top-down given all sorts of messianic solutions. Whole-word. New math. There was one reading system that used a system of digraphs and colors/capitalization to "encode" something like phonics. They were going to eliminate the achievement gap. They were the Solution. Research would show the way to true enlightenment. And they were delusional even as they were saying, "You're not following my 23-step program? Do it for the children! Why do you hate kids?"
The problem was the actual data in the '50s and '60s showed a fairly high high-school drop-out rate, that a lot of students graduating high school weren't college and career ready (meaning they were innumerate and illiterate), and that this was disproportionately affecting rural and poor schools. When the black/poor correlation was pointed out, people started to care because then the real problem was that the achievement gap was affecting majority urban black schools. Few outside of education departments cared before that was pointed out. "Socially relevant" didn't worry about rural kids of any color or poor white kids. Only cities mattered. And average statistics showed whites were doing better than blacks, and to worry about deciles and quartiles in each race's demographic data would undermine the purity of the cause. The highest decile of blacks weren't doing too badly, and the lowest decile of whites were doing worse than blacks on average. Advocates' brains can't handle the nuance; not only are shades of gray confusing, but simple black and white thinking is a problem--they need blinding white and deepest black.
Once there were full-blown, publicly promoted and reported programs for LEPs and minorities, once funding was being directed by the feds preferentially to one group (leaving aside local funding differences), suddenly the full set of facts were politically relevant and a (R) administration could get involved in programs that affected all students and weren't just to improve minority education. We'd have grievance politics before. It was just one more variety of grievance politics.
Since then the various administrations have cherry picked the data (simply echoing education researchers who have elevated this to an art) and proclaimed those cherries to be Asian pears, mangos, and who knows what else instead of choke-cherries. The education messiahs continue to need new fads and ideas to reshape everything to their image, and they too often get federal administrations on board.
Take the latest drive for universal early childhood education. The research is crystal clear. For the lowest achievement groups, high-quality EC education helps children a lot until 3rd grade and has a significant effect on even college attendance. But you need to know the definitions to avoid WYSIATI: Lower-middle-class kids see almost no effect from EC education, and groups above them see even less. For those groups, it's not EC education it's free day care masquerading as "education." "High-quality" has a set definition, and involves reading, number practice, exposure to letters and phonics, and vocabulary building; the workers need special training, and there are strict time commitments. Most EC programs aren't high quality, and the results of the programs drop sharply as soon as the program doesn't meet the definition. By 5th grade, even high-quality programs have vanishing effects on student performance, although for a large enough sample the effects on college attendance are still statistically "significant." Meaning that though very small, the math says they're almost certainly there at a level greater than chance given a certain set of assumptions. (There's a selling point: Okay, vote for this program--it won't help most of you because you're in the wrong SES, it won't help most poor people because there aren't many high quality programs, it will cost a lot and will most likely show some positive effects at the end of high school for perhaps 1 in 1000 kids.)
Common Core? For all the (R) governor participation, it's education researchers that are behind it. Trendy, faddish ones. There are and always have been opposing voices. Duncan can't hear them.
NCLB? The first stirrings of data-driven education combined with a need for rigor and standards-correlated tests. Look to university departments of education for the origins of that. Ravitch was all for it because that's the way the data seemed to point. But education data is notoriously soft. It's like plasticine. The same data can point various directions, depends on the sculptor. Had to read one article and discuss the merits of the findings and how it should be applied in school districts, but I couldn't get past the idea that there were two subjects (two, 2, ii) with no controls and the one teacher involved was specially trained, and the data was from a classroom that involved just that teacher and one student at a time. The conclusion was for mainstreamed kids in classes of 25. I told the panel chair that I wouldn't want to wipe my butt with that paper, it was toxic. "But just imagine that there was a larger sample size and controls. Would those really matter?" She had a Ed.D. degree in the field. But she believed and was ideologically pure. See the problem?
The data on educational outcomes for school systems are robust. Large sample sizes, repeated measurements, replicated results. But you have to look at some details--so here we have a single cohort, other countries divide their cohort and we're comparing all our kids with their college-bound kids (and not their vocational kids). But when you get to advocacy-based research, where some ed theoretician wants to save society and change it over, the resesarch gets awfully sketchy. In many ways, the sketchier the research, the more socially-aware and conscious the conclusions, and the greater the impact. It helps if a marketing guru gets involved to sculpt the conclusions into some sort of a prepackaged program so nobody has to think about it. "This will produce 100% graduation rates at high levels, and my pants all become wrinkle free in the bargain! Goal!!!"
Fads in the '80s? In the '70s? In the '60s? Yeah, they were there and really sucky (otherwise they'd still be "best practices"
. But that's where the halo effect matters. We see (D) initiatives, however idiotic, as good because it's blessed by the sacred (D). Often "seeing them as good" involves ignoring any failures (most were, and some were atrocious) and just evaluating motives. (R) initiatives, no less idiotic, suffer from the halo effect. Halos can be good or bad.
Personally, I think the (R) did a potentially good thing that turned out to be horrible. They took the fads and fetishes that were churning and undermining an already disproportionately dysfunctional, pathetic system serving the nation's rural and poor students and got the non-poor to insist on the same systems for their kids. This had the potential for cleaning up how we educated kids and having an open discussion about what was going on and why. Instead, it fed a research and marketing industry, politicians got rich always preaching the next great fad as a political panacea, advocates still had disproportionate effects because to a shockingly great extent the research showing that schools only determined a bit less than half of a kid's educational outcome still held true.
Yes, there were opposing voices from the '60s to the present. But what's important is to not just fall for WYSIATI, carefully protected by confirmation bias from seeing that the opposing voices were (a) in opposition to the dominant education-theorist voices and (b) either a minority or (c) had tried and failed to show adequate results but were still saying, "Give us more time" or "You didn't *really* try what I said" or "But it wasn't implemented in full accordance with my 3945-point re-revised protocol used in my forthcoming paper, the 193th on the topic." It's easy to see just the opposing voices that agree with us.
We can ignore other important, crucial details. For example, the definition of "literate" has changed. It's always been changing. Making your mark for a signature at one point meant "literate." Then signing your name. Reading the Bible (when you've heard it every week for 18 years). Reading novel, simple text. Then newspapers. Then actual "fine arts" literature. Now it requires a lot more to be considered literate. (Same for numeracy: Simple addition was once good enough. Now it's Algebra I, if not geometry and Algebra II.)
