With the nationalizing of the American healthcare system well underway, nationalizing public education pre-K through 12 is the next big thing on the progressive agenda. Wait for it.

It will be called ObamaCore Education, for short.

The original 2008 Obama campaign Blueprint for Change document included a "Plan to Give Every American Child a World Class Education" and linked to a 15-page, single-spaced document entitled "Barack Obama's Plan For Lifetime Success Through Education." It offered a litany of proposals as part of a broad, federal intervention into America's public education system.

A case can be made that the regime would have been better off, in the long run, nationalizing public education before healthcare, because the fundamental transformation of education would have been easier.

How so? you ask.

The reasons for the relative ease -- compared to ObamaCare -- of installing ObamaCore Education were cited in the American Thinker back in June 2009.

"President Obama will proclaim public education K-12 as too crucial to the future of the nation to be left in the hands of volunteer citizen committees, also known as School Boards and Independent School Districts. And, the distribution of school financing is, Obama will say, too dependent on the varying affluence levels among the states, and within their divergent communities. All of America's youth are entitled to an equal opportunity to receive a world class education. Anything less is unfair. Equal opportunity demands equal funding. It doesn't take a crystal ball to see this coming.

The pragmatic case for uniform public education will cite economy-of-scale advantages whereby the federal government will eliminate multiple duplications of effort in a currently over-staffed management equation where every school district constructs its own buildings, buys its own materials, hires its own staff, and manages its own curriculum to its own state's standards. Why not centralize all those processes and save time, effort and money? will be the argument. Works for Wal-Mart.

Large metropolitan school districts that are almost all dismal failures will gladly turn over their responsibility to the federal government. Most teachers and administrators will welcome the opportunity to become GS workers and enjoy the benefits of greater and more equitable pay, plus relocation opportunities without compensation penalties. Many will welcome the end of the politico-educational fiefdoms called school districts.

Compared to the complexity of redesigning the American health care system, rationalizing the nationalizing of public education K-12 will be a snap.  Most citizens will see no inherent danger in bringing central planning to public education. After all, central equals public, public equals central. So the argument will go.

Obama will claim that taxpayers will pay less for nationalized education since the increase in their federal taxes will be less than what they're now paying in local school taxes, which will go away. Lower taxes - that'll sell."   

From the statists' perspective, nothing has changed since 2009 to lessen the validity of those arguments. 

Recently, in a flurry of parroted articles, the elite media reminded us that U.S. public school students continue to be out-performed by students in other nations.  For example:

• U.S. News on NBC News, December 3, 2013, "US teens lag in global education rankings as Asian countries rise to the top," states that "American teens scored below the international average in math and roughly average in science and reading, compared against dozens of other countries that participated in the 2012 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), which was administered last fall."
• NPR, December 3, 2013, "U.S. Students Slide In Global Ranking On Math, Reading, Science," reports that "American 15-year-olds continue to turn in flat results in a test that measures students' proficiency in reading, math and science worldwide, failing to crack the global top 20."
• The Washington Post, December 2, 2013, "U.S. students lag around average on international science, math and reading test," noted that "While U.S. teenagers were average in reading and science, their scores were below average in math, compared to 64 other countries and economies that participated in the 2012 Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA. That pattern has not changed much since the PISA test was first given in 2000."

The statist media is clearly lining up to help push for federal intervention into the nation's public schools. Good grief -- something has to be done!  Big national problems require big federal government solutions.

In an ad attached to the Washington Post article cited above, the "experts at CTB/McGraw Hill" promote the effectiveness of the Common Core curriculum and direct interested persons on how to download the "eGuide" to Common Core.  (You'll find a brief history of CTB/McGraw Hill here.) Like the drug and insurance companies that lined-up early to support ObamaCare, the textbook publishers will sign-on early for ObamaCore education. (Next time you child student brings home a glossy covered text book, research how much your school district paid for it, and the reasons for college professor authors and book publishers supporting nationalized education will become clear. It's about money.)

Our friends, neighbors and relatives who used the "other-nations-seem-to-be-able-to-do-it-better-than-us" argument to advance ObamaCare are being prepped by the media to make the same argument with regard to ObamaCore Public Education (or maybe it'll be HillaryCore -- where public education takes one, big, national village). 

ObamaCare promoters will argue that it makes no sense for compulsory education to be variously administered in small fiefdoms led by independent school boards where the primary qualification to being elected is the ability to fog a mirror, and school board members need only be marginally literate.

Proponents for changing the role of local school administrators will note how school district superintendents function more as local politicians and controversy firefighters than as professional educators. By comparison, imagine each local post office being its own free-standing enterprise instead of the smoothly-functioning, standardized, nation-wide machine that it is today.

We'll hear the case made that school teachers need to be focused on teaching to national standards so that when students transfer from one part of the country to another they don't have to be re-evaluated. Same for teachers.

Plus, it will facilitate a fairer distribution of educational funding so that, regardless of the socio-economic conditions of their home state, city of residence, and even neighborhood, U.S. students will benefit from the same educational opportunities available from sea-to-shining-sea.

The economic life of the nation depends, we'll be told, on the equality of America's public educational system. It's not only fair, it's...patriotic.

So it's coming -- the nationalization of America's public education. It'll come on the heels of ObamaCare's continuing success, as hardcore Democrats statists and moderate Republican statists work across the proverbial aisle to smooth out the few, initial, speed bumps in the ObamaCare on-line registration process, and compliant citizens align America's healthcare system with the world's other industrialized nations. So they won't make fun of us anymore. Nobody likes being made fun of. Or, better, nobody likes being the brunt of fun-making.  

When that happens, what Professor Fedor Filippovich Korolev (1898-1971), Academy of Pedagogical Science of the U.S.S.R. wrote on 1970 on the occasion of the centenary of the birth of V.I. Lenin, in an article entitled "Lenin and Public Education," shall become true in America.

"Under the influence of the social ideas inherent in the October Revolution, the role of the school and of educational theory underwent a radical change in the course of the construction of socialism. From an instrument of class domination, the school became an instrument of profound social transformations and the spiritual renewal of the individual-an active and powerful force for social change.

"The formulation and solution of educational questions was inseparably connected with Lenin's broad, all-embracing programme of social transformation. His concept of education was firmly based on the education of the new man by whom such changes in society and man himself were to be brought about were part of a single process, and were interconnected. This explains the fact that whatever social process Lenin was analyzing, whatever the economic or political problems he was investigating, he never lost sight of educational questions, which remained constantly within his field of vision."  

And progressives will be the ones we've been waiting for.

Or, grammatically, the ones for whom we've been waiting.