Hire Ed: the secret to making Bush's school reform law work? More bureaucrats.

• Author: Tucker, Marc S.

In 2001, when the Bush administration and Congress were fashioning the No Child Left Behind Act, arguably the most sweeping federal school reform legislation in U.S. history, they used a handful of innovative states as models. One of them was California. Indeed, by the time the president signed NCLB in early 2002, California had already had in place for several years many of the accountability measures the new law mandated. The state sets high standards for what all California students should know at each grade level. It requires statewide tests to measure the performance of students and schools against those standards. And it helps turn around those schools that don't make the grade.

You might expect, then, that California would have been in a good position to handle a key NCLB provision, that each state rank the proficiency of each of its schools. Instead, when that provision kicked in last year, California stumbled. The agency in charge of the task, the California Department of Education, gave failing grades to schools that were actually decent performers, and passing grades to schools that were, in fact, failing. By the time the department realized the errors, it had already released the rankings to the media. The department quickly pulled the lists from its Web site, prompting a flurry of newspaper corrections, as papers across the state retracted stories they had run days earlier. "It was chaos," says Bill Padia, who heads the department's policy and evaluation division.

The problem, it turned out, was that the law required the policy and evaluation division to make the calculations much faster than it had ever done before, using an assessment formula many times more complex than it was used to. Padia's office simply didn't have the capacity to rank, in a matter of days, 9,000 schools with 6.3 million student test scores broken into the dozens of different categories required by NCLB. Making matters worse, California, like many other states, was in the midst of a financial crisis; Padia's staff had been cut by more than one-quarter the previous year. And because the NCLB law has begun to create intense demand for a limited pool of experienced and "knowledgeable testing experts, some of Padia's best people had been poached by testing companies and affluent school systems that could offer higher salaries. Once two-thirds of his 31 staffers had held doctorates, but by the time of the NCLB debacle last summer, only two did, one of whom was Padia himself.

Similar problems have surfaced in a host of other states, from Florida to New Hampshire to Idaho. In December, Illinois' state education agency acknowledged that it had mislabeled at least 300 schools under NCLB. Connecticut discovered that the private firm scoring its tests made so many errors that the state had to halt publication of its school ratings. Michigan had to delay issuing schools report cards for months as it struggled to meld federal scoring requirements with its existing evaluation system, a common problem in many states. When the cards arrived, few Michigan parents could understand them.

All over America, parents, educators, and politicians are in an uproar over NCLB, a law Bush has been hoping to run on in '04 as the signature example of his "compassionate conservative" philosophy. During the early Democratic primaries, presidential candidates competed with each other to denounce the law--even though many of them, including Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and John Edwards (D-N.C.), had voted for it. Yet the anger at NCLB is now as bipartisan as its support once was. In January, the Republican-controlled Virginia House of Delegates voted overwhelmingly to ask Congress to exempt their state from the law. Last month, as a protest against NCLB, Utah's Republican-led legislature voted to spend no state money implementing the law.

To some extent, the backlash against NCLB isn't surprising. For decades, state and local governments that control public education in America have allowed thousands of low-quality schools to go on, year after year, providing substandard education to millions of students, especially poor and minority students. NCLB is the first serious attempt by Washington to hold states, districts, and schools accountable for remedying the situation. Little wonder that many are rebelling on behalf of the status quo.

But there is more to the backlash than hidebound resistance to change. Teachers and parents legitimately complain, for instance, that the simplistic, largely...