How Obama got schooled.

• Author: Toch, Thomas

Under pressure from right and left, the president signed away hard-won federal power over K-12 education and gutted his own reforms, even as they were working.

Barack Obama has not been shy about exercising federal power over the states, in areas ranging from health care to the environment. That's been especially true in elementary and secondary education, where Washington spent $42 billion last year. Obama has leveraged federal school aid to promote higher standards, school choice, better tests, and more meaningful measures of teacher performance. When a paralyzed Congress couldn't make needed fixes to the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), he used a regulatory strategy to let states out from under the law's most troublesome provisions in exchange for commitments to the same reforms.

But just before the December holidays, in a White House ceremony, there he was, like a captive in a hostage video, talking about the importance of "empowering states and school districts to develop their own strategies for improvement." With that, flanked by a bipartisan group of lawmakers, he signed a new federal education law, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which replaced the NCLB and put the direction of the nation's 100,000 public schools and the welfare of fifty million students squarely in the hands of the states and the nation's 13,500 local school systems-effectively allowing them to do as little as they please to improve educational quality.

What brought the president to that moment was an unholy alliance of powerful political forces on the left and the right. One is the Tea Party, the rightwing coalition that has subjected the Common Core State Standards, the latest in three decades of attempts to ratchet up academic rigor, to all manner of conspiracy theories as part of its anti-Washington crusade. Ironically, a primary author of the new federal education law, Republican Senator Lamar Alexander, was George W. Bush's education secretary and a leading proponent of using federal influence to demand accountability from states and school districts. But, capitulating to the rightward drift of his party, when he took over as chairman of the Senate's Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee last year Alexander set about drafting the new federal education law with conservative colleagues including Indiana Republican Todd Rokita, a Tea Party favorite and chairman of the House Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary and Secondary Education. The federal government was "overreaching" in education, they argued, usurping authority over the direction of the nation's $640 billion public education system that rightly belonged with state governments and local school boards. "Federalism is the point of our bill," Rokita told me last year. "It restores local control in education."

But Obama would not likely have put his pen to the new law if many of his Democratic colleagues in Congress hadn't voted with Republicans and abandoned their previous insistence that the federal...