A National Review Online editorial praises efforts on Capitol Hill to scale back federal government involvement in local school decisions.
The Every Child Achieves Act would help to get the federal government out of the education-micromanagement business. Our ideal policy would go even further in this direction, but it’s a good start: The federal government would maintain performance standards, but offer more ways for schools to meet them than the current regimen of tests. It would also eliminate the rigid “adequate yearly progress” requirement, which haunts teachers and administrators, along with the “highly qualified teacher” provision, which keeps competent teachers out of the classroom for a lack of proper licensing. Perhaps most important, while states will still be required to identify low-performing schools, how they get those schools up to snuff will be up to them and the school districts, not to Washington.
The law would put other constraints on the federal government, among them checks on the secretary of education’s liberal regulatory powers — used and abused to educators’ and administrators’ despair under Duncan — and language reinforcing existing prohibitions that keep the Department of Education from insinuating itself into curriculum decisions in charter schools.
The bill is not perfect. In places it has vague language that seems to invite federal meddling; it establishes a new early-childhood program championed by Democratic senator Patty Murray (Wash.); and it does not provide Title I portability, which would have allowed federal money intended to help low-income students to follow them to the school of their choice.
Even so, it would entail a significant deregulation of American education, helping return crucial education decisions to the governments and individuals best equipped to make them. After 15 years of federal mismanagement, it’s time to reform a flunking policy.
