Think tank says No Child Act is destined to fail

Outside Utah, the reaction to this state's anger over the federal No Child Left Behind Act usually falls somewhere between amusement and shock. Always, as with a Christian Science Monitor editorial this week, writers feel obligated to point out that this state gave the president his largest margin of victory last fall.

We're a red state that is seeing red over a program the red people tout as their biggest domestic-policy achievement. Of course, it's also an underfunded program from Washington, where people like to spend in the red.

I'm not sure what all that means, living as I do in a state where "red" tends to refer most often to the sports teams of the state's largest public university. Color schemes don't tend to work well with the intricacies of politics.

Still, those two facts — Utah's rebellion against the law and support for the president — are indeed ironic. But they are not contradictory. Utah voters tend to prefer conservative candidates, and President Bush fits that description in many ways. The No Child Left Behind Act, however, is definitely not one of them.

Or, put differently, it is the exact opposite of some of the president's other initiatives, such as Social Security reform, which is designed to put choices into the hands of the people and away from distant bureaucrats. It is as if the administration, appalled that the centralized Great Society initiatives of Lyndon Johnson have failed through the years, decided the only way to fix the problem was to install its own centralized Great Society initiatives.

That's the theme behind a recent essay Lawrence A. Uzzell wrote for the Cato Institute, a libertarian think-tank in Washington. Uzzell is a former staff member for the U.S. Department of Education as well as for the House and Senate committees on education. His feeling is that the No Child law is destined to fail because, like any centralized program, it tries to force local officials to do things they'd really rather not do.

When people are forced to do something, they'll look for shortcuts. Over time, states will find ways around the law's requirements. If too many schools are failing, or not showing "adequate yearly progress," states will want to relax the standards. Uzzell predicts this will lead to a "race to the bottom" that is typical of centralized programs.