Published: March 1, 1995

Dropping The Bomb On School Codes

While Ratliff operates like a conspirator plotting his government's overthrow, he is just one of a growing number of politicians using blunt tactics to try to reform state education laws. Gov. Pete Wilson of California announced plans in January to replace the state's entire education code by 1997. Soon after, Gov. John Engler of Michigan announced that he, too, would seek to abolish his state's tangled body of school laws and construct an alternative.

Both governors argued that the best way to decentralize education is to start from scratch. But as simple as that may sound, the road from rhetoric to reality could run through a minefield of tough questions about the benefits of local control and the hazards of an all-or-nothing approach.

As policymakers at both the federal and state levels aim to streamline government, education codes are an easy target, observers say. In Texas, for example, a law still on the books prevents school employees from joining "bunds,'' the pro-Nazi Germany groups that formed in the United States in the 1930s. Another three chapters of the code regulate types of school districts...