The Los Angeles Times published a first-rate editorial about the disastrous federal micromanagement spawned by NCLB. It also takes the Obama administration to the woodshed for its own misguided micromanagement of the nation’s public schools.

It says: “The nation is ripe for rebellion against the rigid law and the Obama administration’s further efforts to micromanage how schools are run.”

It adds:

“Passed in 2001, the No Child Left Behind Act used the leverage of federal education funding to push states into doing more for their disadvantaged, black and Latino students, whose academic achievement was appallingly low. Although public schools fall under state rather than federal purview, the rationale behind the interference was that because Congress provided some funding, it had an interest in making sure that the money was achieving its aims. That’s fair enough.

“Unfortunately, the punitive law ushered in a regimen of intensive testing and harsh sanctions against schools that failed to meet improvement markers that were extremely difficult to achieve, sometimes meaningless and often counterproductive. Later, the Obama administration added more layers of interference by pushing its own favored reforms — such as a common curriculum for all states and the inclusion of test scores as a substantial factor in teacher evaluations — in some cases in return for waivers on the No Child Left Behind requirements.”

The federal government was wrong to make scores on standardized tests the measure of all things. It was a colossal error. We didn’t need NCLB to tell us that poor and minority kids were not getting the same test scores as their advantaged peers. We knew that from state scores and SAT scores and multiple other sources. The issue was what to do about it. Congress decided that measuring the gap was reform. however, none of their “remedies”–enacted without any evidence–was effective. Twelve years after the law was enacted, none of the law’s so-called remedies has worked.

The fact is that no one–repeat, NO ONE–in Congress or the U.S. Department of Education (then or now) knows how to reform the nation’s public schools. Secretary Rod Paige didn’t, nor did Secretary Margaret Spellings. Certainly Secretary of Education Arne Duncan doesn’t. His Renaissance 2010 plan in Chicago was a much-hyped failure that has left the wreckage of lives and communities in its wake. Why was he allowed to turn Renaissance 2010 into Race to the Top?

The one-size-fits-all NCLB is wrong for most schools, and Race to the Top heaps on more punishments while blaming teachers for low test scores. This law and this program, and the thinking behind them, have diverted the public’s attention from the root causes of poor academic performance, which include poverty, segregation, and under-resourced schools. Instead of confronting root causes, our elites confront the failure of the NCLB regime of high-stakes testing by demanding more of the same and making the stakes higher for teachers and principals.

Kudos to the Los Angeles Times for recognizing that the federal government has overstepped the bounds of federalism, has imposed impossible mandates, and is out of its league.

The dilemma in framing the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act is that Congress can’t see beyond the narrow and punitive mindset of NCLB. It is locked into stale thinking. It refuses to see the disastrous consequences of both NCLB and Race to the Top.

Future historians will puzzle out why the Obama administration threw away the chance to bring a fresh vision to federal education policy and why it chose to tighten the screws on the nation’s schools and teachers and why it chose to lend its prestige and funding to the privatization movement.

In the future, I believe, the period that began in 2001 and continues to this day will be remembered as the “Bush-Obama era” in education. It will be recalled as a time when a liberal Democratic president watched in silence as states attacked the teaching profession, lowered standards for entry into teaching, enacted laws to end collective bargaining, authorized privatization with federal funding and encouragement, and passed laws permitting vouchers for private and religious schools.