This N&O editorial praises Barack Obama’s nomination of Arne Duncan for U.S. Secretary of Education. That’s fine. I expected them to toe the party line.

But their reasoning gets dicey. They praise Duncan as someone who will “try new things to get the job done for the ones who matter most, children. This has been Duncan’s focus in Chicago, and he now will be in a bully pulpit to encourage risk-taking and new ideas nationwide.” On the other hand, No Child Left Behind “has hardly revolutionized public education.”

No Child Left Behind was a huge risk and clearly a new idea. I mean, it standardized measurement of student performance for every public school in the nation, and it outlined a sequence of school reforms to improve the performance of low-performing, low-income schools. That’s never been done by the federal government before. As the editors say, it “hardly revolutionized public education,” but its results should not be attributed to a lack of vision by the Bush administration.

Indeed, No Child Left Behind failed because the federal government is incapable of “revolutionizing” public education or anything else. Duncan and Obama will find that out soon.