(Note: This was originally published in the March 6, 2012 edition of the Herald)

Here’s the latest news on the education front: Twenty-six more states have asked to be exempt from the No Child Left Behind Act. That’s on top of the 11 states Obama gave a special dispensation to last month. If the president extends his blessing to all the new supplicants, three quarters of the fifty states will be exempt. So how did that happen?

After all, NCLB became the law of the land with bipartisan support in 2002. Now, both parties oppose it—the Republicans because it gives the federal government too much influence and the Democrats because NCLB rules are so rigid they could close down half of America’s public schools.

Public school teachers and their unions have long opposed NCLB because, they say, it forces teachers to “teach to” the questions on standardized tests. While there may be a few “rubber room” types who would be happy to load up their daily lesson plans with test-taking practice, copyright laws don’t allow that. Nevertheless, the teachers unions continue to demagogue this red herring by protesting student scores on standardized tests are being used to evaluate teachers.

In response, the Obama administration has decided to let states get around such core NCLB rules as the requirement that 100% of students pass standardized literacy skills tests in math and reading by 2014.

There’s a catch in the Obama work-around, though. States seeking NCLB waivers must adopt such administration policies as “linking teacher evaluations to student test scores.” (See “No-Child Law Faces Wave of Opt-Outs” in Wall Street Journal, March 1, 2012.) Thus, what the administration gives with one hand, it takes away with the other.

The fact is good teachers never teach to standardized tests anyway. Instead, they teach to the tasks individuals must perform for success in school, college and beyond. The biggest problem is not with teachers or tests, but with what is not being taught in our schools—the specific knowledge and skills needed in today’s workplace. This, by the way, is one of the major causes of high unemployment, especially in the manufacturing sector.

Ed Hughes, president and CEO of Gateway Community and Technical College in Kentucky recently explained it this way: “In the 1980s, U.S. Manufacturing was 80 percent brawn and 20 percent brains, but now it’s 10 percent brawn and 90 percent brains.” The 80 percent brawn ratio probably goes farther back than the 1980s. Certainly, though, the time when manufacturing requires a much greater range of cognitive skills and materials knowledge is already upon us.

In June 2011 President Obama announced a national goal to credential 500,000 community college students, using as a standard the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) Manufacturing Certification Skills System, which includes everything from product distribution logistics to aerospace and bioscience technologies. Like so many of the administration’s transformative goals, though, this one is pure pie-in-the-sky. There’s no money to pay for such an initiative and 500,000 credentialed community college students wouldn’t begin to meet the brain-power demands of 21^st Century manufacturing.

Thus, Congress and the White House continue to kick our federal budget and our national knowledge deficits down the road for another decade or so!

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