By Joel Mathis and Ben Boychuk
Scripps Howard News Service

U.S. President Barack Obama is refashioning the nation's education policy in his own image. With Congress likely to revamp the No Child Left Behind law this year, Obama and his secretary of education, former Chicago schools chief Arne Duncan, have been making the case for aggressive reforms.

The president last month told the nation's governors that he wants to make federal education funding contingent on the states adopting new national reading and math standards.

Then Obama announced a $900 million federal initiative to reduce the high school dropout rate. About one-tenth of the 25,000 public high schools in the United States produce more than half of the dropouts. Obama says schools could be closed and principals replaced as ``a last resort."

Are Obama's reform proposals the key to turning around America's schools? Or are they more unworkable, top-down mandates? Ben Boychuk and Joel Mathis, the RedBlueAmerica columnists, grade the president's proposals.

Ben Boychuk

When it comes right down to it, President Obama's solution for every social problem from health insurance to the home mortgage foreclosure crisis is centralization. Education is no different.

Although Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan bandy about words such as ``innovation" and ``competition," the reforms they're proposing are as dictatorial and bureaucratic as anything Lyndon Johnson conjured 40 years ago, or George W. Bush sold in 2002.

No Child Left Behind was the signature Republican education reform of the 2000s. It was also Bush's greatest domestic policy failure. Conservatives like the idea of high standards and accountability. Conservatives also believe in equality of opportunity (as opposed to equality of outcome) and parental choice.

No Child Left Behind promised all of those things, and delivered none of them. Instead, federal control over schools grew exponentially; federal funding of K-12 education nearly doubled between 2002 and 2009; and student test scores languished.

Obama now wants the federal government to have a direct say in what local schools teach. The administration would tie federal funding for poor and minority students to states' adoption of as-yet-unwritten national reading and math standards. That would be a massive and unprecedented extension of federal power.

If the president wants to be a real reformer, he should get the federal government out of the education business and let states, cities and parents decide how best to educate the next generation of Americans.

Joel Mathis

Here's a secret: If a bipartisan consensus exists on anything in Washington, D.C., it's this: The federal government has a prominent role to play in funding and setting standards for K-12 education across the country.

The Reagan-era campaign by Republicans to abolish the Department of Education is over and has been for a long time. Check out the GOP's 2008 platform if you doubt this.

That's not going to change in this era of recession. State budgets are melting away under the strain of the recession and withdrawing federal support would be disastrous for many school systems. So ``getting the federal government out of the education business" is a libertarian pipe dream.

Rather than re-argue debates that have been largely settled for three decades, we should ask a more realistic question: What can the federal government do to ensure the best-possible education for our kids?

From that standpoint, the notable thing about President Obama's education proposals is how flexible they are. Instead of imposing a one-size-fits-all solution upon the states, the Obama administration intends to spread money around to programs that try new and innovative ways of instructing students.

And this Democratic president is hardly letting the teachers' unions block the path to reform: He's proposed firing entire staffs in poorly performing schools. These are the kinds of measures that Republicans have long advocated. All that's missing is vouchers.

There's still the complaint, though, about a federal power over local education. But it's not unreasonable to tie federal funding to federal standards.

Is New York math different than North Dakota math? Is Oregon reading different from Ohio's? Why on earth would students in those states be held to different standards? It makes no sense.

Debates over the best ways to educate our students will be with us always. The argument over whether the federal government has a role to play, though, is over. Taking the discussion back to the 1970s is no way to help students now.

Ben Boychuk is managing editor of the Heartland Institute's School Reform News. Joel Mathis blogs at http://politics.pwblogs.com and http://www.infinitemonkeysblog.com.