One objection to this proposal might be that states have often proven little better at handling education than Washington. How will devolving power back to them help?

That is a reasonable objection. States have indeed been consolidating power over education at the same time as the federal government and have little more to show for it. And they have failed largely for the same reason as the federal government: while states are closer to the families who are being short-changed by public schooling, state governments are still huge political institutions dominated by special interests, and power is still held by politicians and bureaucrats, not parents.

That is also true in many school districts, which have become much larger and more centralized over the last century. Some districts encompass entire counties, and large urban districts often have in excess of 100,000 students. New York City has more than a million. Even “locally,” then, individual parents often have very little recourse when they are unhappy with the schools. That is why the public must demand that policymakers introduce universal choice at the state and local level once federal entanglement is removed.

The looming expiration of the federal No Child Left Behind Act has prompted a flood of commission reports, studies, and punditry. Virtually all of those analyses have assumed that the law should and will be reauthorized, disagreeing only over how it should be revised. They have accepted the law’s premises without argument: that government-imposed standards and bureaucratic “accountability” are effective mechanisms for improving American education and that Congress should be involved in their implementation.

In this paper, we put those preconceptions under a microscope and subject NCLB to a thorough review. We explore its effectiveness to date and ask whether its core principles are sound.

PROBLEM: We find that No Child Left Behind has been ineffective in achieving its intended goals, has had negative unintended consequences, is incompatible with policies that do work, is at the mercy of a political process that can only worsen its prospects, and is based on premises that are fundamentally flawed. We further conclude that NCLB oversteps the federal government’s constitutional limits—treading on a responsibility that, by law and tradition, is reserved to the states and the people. We therefore recommend that NCLB not be reauthorized and that the federal government return to its constitutional bounds by ending its involvement in elementary and secondary education.

Previous policy reports on the future of the No Child Left Behind Act have rested on the assumption that the law’s basic principles are sound, and those reports have thus failed to critically examine NCLB’s performance or long-term prospects for success. Worse yet, they have generally ignored important evidence that contradicts their assumptions.

The evidence and analysis presented here make it clear that the federal government has no proper role in American education beyond enforcing civil rights laws. Moreover, neither federal interventions in general nor NCLB in particular have lived up to the expectations set out for them. Nor can they, because federal intrusions actually discourage states from pursuing truly effective policies—those based on parental choice, school autonomy, and competition.

Several states have already begun to move down the road to educational freedom through education tax credit programs (both for families’ own use and for donations to scholarship funds that serve low-income families) and school voucher programs. Thus far, those programs are still too small to genuinely transform American education. The NCLB reauthorization debate, however, is an ideal time to pause, examine the evidence, and admit that school choice policies—not more centralization in Washington—are by far the most promising avenue for realizing our educational goals and ideals.