Another Washington success story

Because the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act imposed standards and accountability on the public schools, many conservatives were willing to support the law even though it was also a massive expansion of the federal government's role in education.

It might be time for them to reconsider.

On Thursday, the Department of Education announced that a key component of the measure -- the $6 billion Reading First program -- has been an utter failure.

The program was intended to improve reading comprehension scores in low-income elementary schools. But the study found that there was no difference in test scores among children who participated in the program and those who did not.

Defenders of the Reading First offered various excuses for the results, but the bottom line is simple. Taxpayers spent $6 billion -- that's with a "b" -- on a federal endeavor that didn't deliver squat.

"We need to seriously re-examine this program," said Rep. George Miller, the California Democrat who chairs the House Education Committee, "and figure out how to make it work better for students."

But isn't that simply throwing good money after bad?

Reading First was a centerpiece of No Child Left Behind. What does its failure tell taxpayers that they can realistically expect in return for funding a bigger federal education bureaucracy?

If you answered "improved student performance" you need your knuckles rapped.

The Department of Education was created barely 30 years ago -- it was Jimmy Carter's sop to the teacher unions. Since then, the state of the American public school system has been in annual decline.

The country would be far better off if we stopped filtering education tax dollars through the beltway, blew up the entire federal Education Department along with No Child Left Behind, and instead let states and local districts take the lead in embarking upon aggressive reform.