English mathematician, logician and philosopher John Venn introduced the Venn diagram in the 1880s. A Venn diagram uses overlapping circles to illustrate the logical relationships between two or more sets of items. Often, Venn diagrams serve to highlight how the items are similar and different. They can also help us visualize things in new ways and afford us the opportunity to make fresh observations.
There was a time when you could create a Venn diagram with conservatism, which is an ideology, in one distinct area and Republican practices and policies, which are partisan, in another. There would have been plenty of overlap in the middle. In recent years, the middle overlap section appears to be shrinking. An example of this is the idea of local control in education. Just a few short years ago, local control would have been in the middle of the diagram; now it sits off on the conservative side, with very few Republicans even acknowledging it.
Conservatives have long held the belief in local control, especially when it comes to education. In education, local control refers to the concept that the education of children in a public school district should be made by those closest to the site of education. The management of public schools is usually left to elected or appointed representatives serving on governing bodies, such as school boards, who are located in the communities served by their schools.
