Wonkbook: Governing by waiver
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(Photo by Alexander F. Yuan)
In Beijing, China, in August 2010, there was a 62-mile traffic jam that lasted for 12 days. The cause wasn’t an earthquake or an accident or a shooting. There were simply too many cars, and particularly too many trucks, and eventually, nothing could move.
This is the metaphor we’ve chosen for when Republicans and Democrats in Congress can’t come to agreement and so Congress ends up doing nothing. “Gridlock,” we call it, as if the bills are piled up, one after another, because Congress tried to do too much too fast.
This is a mistake. It’s a metaphor that leads us awry. When Congress can’t get anything done, things do happen. It just means they happen outside of Congress.
Take No Child Left Behind, the big school reform bill passed by President George W. Bush with the support of liberal Democrats like Sen. Ted Kennedy and Rep. George Miller and conservative Republicans like Rep. John Boehner.
No Child Left Behind technically expired in 2007. But Congress didn’t manage to do anything about it. They just kept appropriating money for the zombie bill. And so the outdated provisions of this out-of-touch bill began strangling the education system.
NCLB says that fully 100 percent of school districts need to meet tough proficiency goals in reading and math in 2014 or they lose tons of money. It’s not going to happen. They’re not going to hit those targets and that’s been clear for years now. Everyone knows NCLB needs an overhaul. But, you know, Congress.
So the Obama administration has started waiving NCLB for states that propose sufficiently rigorous alternative plans. So far, 39 states and the District of Columbia have been let out of No Child Left Behind. On Wednesday, they were joined by eight individual school districts in California — Los Angeles, Long Beach, Santa Ana, Fresno, Oakland, Sacramento, San Francisco and Sanger. That’s the first time that’s ever happened.
“This is a pretty troubling development,” Chris Minnich, executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers, told The Post. “The states have always traditionally been in control of accountability for most school districts. . . . The idea that the secretary of education is controlling the accountability system in eight districts in California is kind of mind-boggling.”
Of course, the Obama administration says, with some justification, that it would’ve been