"It's a monster, as are all education standards documents. Typically, the problematic phrases are buried in several places. I haven't read it yet, so I can't point them out, but I suggest to you that mere argument about whether Someone directed the Big Bang or not is not the problem here."

I never mention was a problem; so your suggestion is worthless.

"I have lived through the attempted cooption of science by religion in school. We are talking about an attempt to declare scientific method and theory to be open to popular vote rather than rigorous standards."

The scientific method is open to popular vote. One need only look at the body of work concerning Global warming to prove this point. But I would say that in a Republic, the ultmitate authority on what is taught would rest with The People. When individuals assume The People are too stupid and can not to trusted with this aspect of soveriegnty they are undermining this country and basis upon which it was founded.

"Incidentally, the 17-year-old says we should have academic courses on religion in school, as electives, so that this stuff has somewhere else to go. She's right. The "intelligent design" people wouldn't like that, though: they want "equal time" in the science classroom, whether their philosophy is science or not."

The 17 year old should have the choice of studying religion in school and it is not important whether some "intelligent design" people do or don't want this. Another aspect here is the administration vs teacher. The administration task is to hire and fire teachers and SERVE the needs of the teachers and students [who are also accepted or expelled by the administration]. Dictating what a teacher should teach will give poor results, the teacher must take responsibility for his/her task of teaching. This of course involves the classic problems regarding power and the need of employing various mechanisms to balance this power.

"Incidentally, the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study initial results for 2003 are available. American children score slightly above average, but below Asian nations who are not engaged in making science ideologically acceptable. If we are not interested in improving actual education, our kids and grandkids will be doing the kind of factory work that "Made in Japan" signified to me when I was a kindergartener. Welcome to the Third World."

I would say the Asian nation have an advantage of having a relatively fresh look at education- and you could say they cherry pick what works best and the choose the best teachers. But I think that one has to understand the US dominates the world in manys ways, and also it would be counter productive to want to continue to dominate the world and really couldn't continue this level of dominance if we wanted to [our level of dominance in all areas has been shrinking for decades]. We want to the whole world to be more prosperous. I think that in terms of Education it is similar to Security. Take away America miltary power and the world will devolve into chaos, take away American Education and the world would devolve into ignorance. In other words we have been purposely assisting other countries in terms of security and in terms of enlightenment/education. The idea that if Japan does better, we will do worse is not any different than if your neighor does better you will be worse off.
With that said, we have lots of improvement we can achieve in the area of Education- if the Education had made the same level of reform has had our miltary in the last couple of decade, we would be far ahead of other countries in terms of education.