I was wrong. When the Every Student Succeeds Act passed in late 2015, I identified two ambiguities I thought were most ripe for exploitation to keep the federal boot hovering over public schools: the requirement that states have “challenging” curricular standards and that standardized tests be given “much greater” weight in accountability systems than non-academic measures.

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Certainly, DC may still seize upon these words to extend control. But according to a Friday New York Times report, it is the law’s call for “ambitious” student performance goals—a term not defined in statute—that the Trump administration, which I thought would be highly deferential to states (wrong again!), is citing to reject state plans.

And so we remain pretty much where we were under the Obama administration in education, and where we are with every law that leaves it to regulatory agencies to fill in the meaning of crucial terms: with states, localities, and the people at the mercy of bureaucrats and secretaries. Government increasingly of men and not laws.

Alas, this bureaucratically dictatorial state of affairs is okay with some people in DC. In an exchange this weekend, a former Obama administration spokesman lauded the regulatory process as a “transparent” and “consistent” way to “fill in the blanks left by the law”.

I was wrong about the specific opening by which the ESSA might be used to maintain federal control over the nation’s public schools. But in stating that federal control is itself unconstitutional, and rule by bureaucrats especially egregious, I remain clearly in the right.

Read the source article at Cato Institute

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