Next month, No Child Left Behind will enter into its sixth year as the federal government's chief K-12 education law. Amidst all of the debate, criticism, and occasional outright rancor over the law it may be useful to take a big picture look at the law, what it has and has not accomplished, and where best to go from here.

George Will, a leading conservative columnist offers an attempt at this big picture perspective in Sunday's Washington Post. The title of his article, "Getting Past 'No Child'" suggest his predictable position: the federal law is over-intrusive, cumbersome, and a negative impact on local and state governments who, if they could only rid themselves of that pesky federal government, would be well on their way to providing every child with an excellent quality education.

If conservative thinkers like Will and liberal education elites like Jonathon Kozol both oppose the law (for completely different reasons, of course), it begs the question: who exactly is in support of the law? And how is it that most observers in D.C. expect the law to be reauthorized as a matter of inevitability? Could this be yet another instance of inside-the-beltway obstinacy in the face of overwhelming public scrutiny, or might it be the case that House and Senate leaders are somehow exercising strong leadership in the face of public pressure?

The answer to the latter question is, of course, a matter of opinion that depends on whether you are for or against the law. But here is list and a rebuttal of common conservative criticisms, since those will be the most talked about ones in the coming week in light of Mr. Will's column.

Conservative criticisms of NCLB stem from the argument that the federal government should have never obtained a role in education policy in the first place. Will provides this standard thesis when he writes that federal involvement in education policy back in 1965 was wrong for three reasons: "First, most new ideas are dubious, so the federalization of policy increases the probability of continentwide mistakes. Second, education is susceptible to pedagogic fads and social engineering fantasies -- schools of education incubate them -- so it is prone to producing continental regrets. Third, America always is more likely to have a few wise state governments than a wise federal government."

The first problem with this argument is that they are similar arguments that were used 150 years ago to support states rights to allow slavery in the south, and just 50 years ago to fight back the progress of the Civil Rights Movement. The idea of African-Americans being equal to whites was once "dubious", and the notion of equal treatment and equal rights regardless of skin-color was also seen as a "social engineering fantasy". The state governments that Mr. Will holds to be so wise include the government of Arkansas, which in 1958, faced with federal pressure to integrate its schools, chose to shut down the entire school year for three high schools in Little Rock rather than let black kids join white kids in classrooms. More recently, it is the state governments (aided, I will admit, by a weakness in the federal law that needs to be fixed during re-authorization) that have chosen to lower the bar for students to be judged as "proficient" rather than keep high standards and raise up the kids to meet them.

Secondly, Will seems to be conflating the "federalization of policy" with the "federalization of schools". No one, not even the most ardent supporters of NCLB, wants schools to follow lock-step federally-imposed schedules from day one, minute one of a school year. What NCLB supporters do want is for policy makers and educators in every state to have one goal in mind: increasing student achievement as much as possible. Insofar as inequality in education along state and local lines has forever been an American problem even before federal invovlement in education, I wonder what year Will would point to as the golden period in American education?

Lastly, Will seems to miss the point altogether. His main empricial argument against NCLB is that the federal law has allowed states to game the system by making "proficiency" a meaningless term through watered down tests, low cut scores, and other loop-holes. Ignoring the fact that he is putting the blame squarely at the feet of the very folks (states) that he suggests can do a better job than the feds, the solution here is not to let the states do even more to get out of accountability, but rather to shore up the weaknesses in the law in the first place.