Some very good insights from inside the system.

Vouchers aside, I don't think you can ever create a universal school concept, operated from Washington, that will solve problems that are almost exclusively local.

Frankly, I don't think education should be a Federal problem, and never should have been. Local control and local solutions.

We put men on the Moon without a Federal Department of Education. We educated millions of non-English-speaking immigrants over the past hundred years without a Federal solution or universal testing. How was that done? Hint: bi-lingual eduation was not involved.

Even now, countless Asian immigrants--many of them poor and unskilled, and who speak no English--seem to come over here and do pretty damn good in the schools. Why?

There are real issues here. The answers aren't simple, and some of them go into cultural issues that make liberals very uncomfortable. But they aren't going to be solved in Washington. Bush should have taken a different approach.