Unfortunately, President Obama has not caught onto this trend of failed policies. Instead, he has taken a liking to blaming No Child Left Behind as the root of America’s education woes by offering states waivers from its strict standards-based benchmarks. While the President is certainly right that the 2002 law has been ineffective in improving academic achievement, he forgets that it is only one reform in a long line of failed federal interventions in education since the publication of A Nation at Risk.

Even more tragic, the President’s alternative to No Child Left Behind takes the same approach as all the previous failures by again requiring that states raise their academic standards to receive a waiver. The same strategy applies to Race to the Top, where states are also required to raise standards to be eligible for a share of $4.35 billion in grant funding.

Even a recent study by the left-leaning Brookings Institution agrees that the Obama Administration’s repetitive education policy is bound to fail because its focus on raising state standards is historically proven to be ineffective. “The quality of state standards, as indicated by the well-known ratings from the Fordham Foundation, is not related to state achievement,” the 2012 Brown Center Report of American Education finds. Furthermore, “[t]he rigor of state standards, as measured by how high states place the cut point for students to be deemed proficient, is also unrelated to achievement.”

Read more: http://americansforprosperity.org/legislativealerts/the-obama-administrations-insane-educational-reforms/#ixzz20jPw4FXQ