weekly response

Nearly a decade since President Bush signed No Child Left Behind into law, President Obama is now taking steps to dismantle its most ineffective stipulations. The new terms set by the President acknowledge the variable conditions and circumstances in school districts nationwide. States can now apply for a waiver and set their own standards of achievement. These changes will make our education system more efficient, relieving districts and teachers of monolithic standardized tests and counterproductive "failing" labels.

Two weeks ago, I proposed that we reinvigorate the nation by setting a goal. With this in mind, we can look to No Child Left Behind as a useful case of a failed national goal. Much blame for the law's ineffectiveness has been placed on its framework as a goal: that 100% of students reach grade-level proficiency in reading and math by 2014. Critics of the law say that this was, and always will be, impossible.

I don't need to explain why these critics are 100% right, nor will I waste space ranting about how 100% of anything misses the point completely.

Rather, I'll point out one facet of this debacle that could be easily twisted to set us back another ten years. We didn't achieve the goal of No Child Left Behind, and this was a lofty goal indeed. But our inevitable failure cannot be a referendum on lofty goals. It's not simply that we set a goal too big, too much, too ambitious. Because as we well know, it was also silly and irrelevant.

We can learn from No Child Left Behind not to stake our national dignity on ending 100% of civilian casualties or picking up all of the cigarette butts. But this doesn't mean we shouldn't aim to demonize fast food to oblivion or use public resources to modernize public schools, as President Obama declares in his address. We can still clean up the streets and the ocean. These are goals that we can achieve, that are, by definition, attainable. And not only are they attainable, they are bigger and better than anything No Child Left Behind had to offer.

We can learn from one of the simplest, most accessible economic theories, the law of diminishing returns, that if we spend to the moon, there will remain middle school dropouts. Thankfully, President Obama is not wasting our time by complaining about the failures of No Child Left Behind, but rather proposing new goals that can bring us to a smarter, successful future. Now, with proper doses of federal spending, state sovereignty, and some confidence in our abilities, we can finally lift our children from the middle of the pack among nations. That is an attainable goal.