Wake the fool up

So let's follow up the last post about good government spending with one about a program I hate seeing federal dollars spent on:

The Obama administration is proposing a sweeping overhaul of President Bush's signature education law, No Child Left Behind, and will call for broad changes in how schools are judged to be succeeding or failing, as well as for the elimination of the law's 2014 deadline for bringing every American child to academic proficiency.

I have an even more radical idea for a "sweeping overhaul" of the program: Kill that sucker dead, and return education to the states where it belongs. NCLB was and will always be a doomed concept. The idea that each and every child in America can be reached is preposterous, and the idea that such a lofty goal can be reached with the call for "adequate yearly progress" is a fool's dream.

And while we're at it, let's replace the entire Department of Education with a computer and maybe six or seven employees whose sole function would be to use th ecomputer to keep track of state and local education experiments, rate them as successful or not, and make a list of the efforts and their ratings widely available to educators and politcians.