In a NY Times op-ed piece--Every State Left Behind--, Diana Ravitch makes the case, contrary to Bush administration policy, for a single national set of tests, standards and curriculum for America's schools.

Two of these (which are really just one--tests imply standards), are a good idea for more than the reasons she cited.  We need to be able to compare educational success or failure at all levels, to be able to hold states up against each other to see who is finding the most success for their efforts, and we need to be able to compare our children's abilities to those of the rest of the world.  

It's post-mortems as far as the eye can see. In the midst of them I've read a lot of warnings against scapegoating, blaming some part of the other side for our own failings.  We need to look at ourselves.  Why don't people like us?  What's wrong with the way we talk about issues? What are the Republicans doing that we're not?

Those are important questions and a lot of smart people have come up with a lot of smart answers to them.  But I don't see what's wrong with doing a little scapegoating at the same time.  I mean, there is real evil out there, and it is doing evil things to our electorate, and people need to know it.  Republicans need to know it most of all.

In the wake of the election it is easy to forget that the Republican party right now is coming apart at the seams.  I mean, they sure did look united at the polls.  And in victory they did a lot high-fiving and hugging (maybe not so much hugging -- they are Republicans, after all).

But in fact this Republican party is suffering from a disease the Democrats have known about for a long time.  This Republican party is a coalition in which all the parts don't always get along so swimmingly.  Think Colin Powell.  Think John McCain.  There are plenty of fiscal conservatives who don't especially care for Bible thumpers.

We need to reach out to these Republicans in a united effort to squash our common enemy: the religious right.  We need to remind them that their President has made a deal-with-the-devil and that he is far more indebted at this point to Ralph Reid than to any Big Corporation or free market philosophy, and at the first sign of a clash, he'll have only one way to turn. This fact has to be scary for a good portion of the GOP.

Of course, we have to be careful not to make another deal-with-the-devil ourselves (Lord knows we've made enough).  But our first order of business ought to be collecting enough weight to push the religious fundamentalists back where they belong -- to the fringes of American politics.