From tonight’s Bush press conference, regarding the dreadful No Child Left Behind Act:

The system for too long had just shuffled children through and just hoped for the best. And guess what happened? We had people graduating from high school who were illiterate — and that’s just not right in America. It wasn’t working. And so I came to Washington and worked with both Republicans and Democrats — this is a case where bipartisanship was really working well. And we said, look, we’re going to spend more money at the federal level. But the federal government, what, spends about 7 percent of the total education budgets around the country.But we said, let’s change the attitude…

We’ve come a long way from this. See also this. And whatever happened to the Constitution? As the bipartisan National Conference of State Legislatures concluded in February:

“This assertion of federal authority into an area historically reserved to the states has had the effect of curtailing additional state innovations and undermining many that had occurred during the past three decades,” the report said.

“The task force does not believe that N.C.L.B. is constitutional,” it said.

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Why no one paid me to sell “No Child Left Behind”