In that year, which was some 40 years after the start of a massive effort by reformers to consolidate districts into larger administrative units, there were about 120,000 individual school districts in the U.S. This meant that on average there were only two schools per district. Now, that is really local control. Even now, after consolidation education and resources has continued for another 60 years, we still have about 15,000 separate school districts -- each with primary control over financing, staffing, and setting curriculum standards for our schoolsCertainly state governments have taken steps over the years to assert greater control over these matters in K-12 schooling, education and even the federal government has made tiny and tentative moves in this direction. But all these efforts have been undertaken in the face of enormous resistance by local communities, which have vigorously fought to preserve the autonomy of their schools.

The School Board''s new policy reflects the spirit and intention of the state''s original law allowing provisional custody in the first place, an issue involving the legal status of children whose parents are divorced. resources Board member Catherine Davis, chairwoman of the board''s Policy Committee, said parents or custodians with provisional custody agreements that are not court-ordered education by the beginning of the next school year will have to take their children out of the school they are attending. For the last resources several years, homeschooling has been the fastest growing educational alternative in the country. Estimates of its growth rate typically range from 15-25% annually. Homeschoolers are notoriously difficult to count, however, the National Homeschooling Research Institute believes that currently 1.2 million children homeschool today. While education this constitutes only about 2% of all school age children, itÿýs more than 20% of those outside the government resources educational system. And, with a 20% annual growth rate, another quarter million children will join the homeschooling movement this year.

A modest proposal by President Clinton for vague and voluntary national standards provoked strong opposition education in Congress and elsewhere. A variety of efforts on the part of states to introduce some forms of curriculum guidelines and to reinforce them with statewide testing resources have stirred up strong reactions at the local level. Reinforcing this local response to setting standards has been the hostility toward government that has characterized education the politics of the last two decades. Increasingly, elected officials have won office on a platform of being resources relentlessly education anti-government. They see their primary job as an effort to protect local communities and individual citizens from the intrusion of government control Denver should consolidate its program for gifted middle-schoolers resources to stop children from leaving for private, charter and magnet schools, the program''s leader said Thursday.