Kinda like the way Kentucky Landed Toyota

This from Kevin Carey at The Quick and the Ed:

Lawless Policymaking

...Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings announced that she would allow 10 states to change what they do with schools that fail to make "adequately yearly progress" under NCLB.

...This is not, in the strictest sense of the word, legal.

The black-letter law is pretty clear: If you want federal money, you have to implement an accountability system that works as follows.

There are no sections or subparagraphs that say The Secretary of Education may at her discretion alter or ignore the previous subparagraphs if people seem to agree they're not written well and Congress doesn't get around to reauthorizing the law on schedule.

But this is nothing new; Sec. Spelling did the same thing with a "growth model" pilot project a few years ago, which allowed states to rate schools based on year-to-year improvement, rather than absolute levels of performance.

Sec. Spellings can do this for a simple reason: nobody objects.

She's using what amounts to an extra-legal, consensus-driven process of amending the law without going through the whole hassle of introducing bills, havings votes, getting lobbied, etc. etc.

The check on this method is that anyone with standing can derail it simply by saying so: If Senator Kennedy, Representative Miller, Representative Boehner, or any of the major interest groups hated the idea, it wouldn't be happening. But since the
only real objections have been "it doesn't go far enough," the process goes ahead. It's actually a pretty efficient when you think about it....