President Obama’s proposed overhaul of No Child Left Behind is long overdue. Over the past decade the regime’s rigid metrics and penalties transformed schools into testing factories. Unfortunately, the White House proposal—which replaces NCLB’s legal sticks with new legal carrots—won’t come close to fixing America’s schools.
The president has drawn the wrong lesson from the law’s failure. The fundamental defect of No Child Left Behind is that it elevated a sensible evaluation tool—standardized testing—into a legal requirement.
]]>Reviving the authority of individuals over daily choices is also my interest (see Life Without Lawyers: Restoring Responsibility in America), except that my emphasis is on overbearing law, not corporate monopolies and distant officials. My elevator speech might be something like this:
]]>Studies indicate that the largest drivers of waste, with rough percentages each contributing to unnecessary costs, are these: fee-for-service incentives for unnecessary care (50 percent)[4], the lack of consumer responsibility (40 percent)[5], defensive medicine (20 percent)[6], excess bureaucracy (20 percent)[7] and fraud (10 percent)[8].
]]>One source of waste—important but not the largest—is the defensiveness that pervades the practice of medicine. Universally, doctors don’t trust the system of justice. The distrust is more than justified—the error rate is about 25 percent and the horrible, demeaning, adversarial process (an average of five years to settlement) is itself enough to drive some physicians from practice (see pp. 84-87 of Atul Gawande’s excellent Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance.
The proposed bills in Congress offer no serious proposals for malpractice reform:
]]>Last week’s headlines tell the story:
• President Obama appointed a deficit-reduction commission to recommend the hard choices that our elected representatives won’t make.
• A popular Democratic senator, Evan Bayh of Indiana, announced he will not stand for re-election, citing “too much partisanship and not enough progress.”
• Washington can’t even spend stimulus money—The Government Accounting Office reported that barely 10 percent of a $5 billion program to weatherize almost 600,000 homes had been spent because of red tape.
But what’s the source of this paralysis? It’s certainly true that there’s excess partisanship, and special interests have too much influence. Both parties are guilty, with Democrats selling out to the trial lawyers to prevent any malpractice reform and Republicans engaging in scare tactics about “death panels.” But I have a different take: The partisanship is mainly a symptom of a deeper powerlessness. Politicians posture and point fingers because they’ve learned it’s impossible to take responsibility.
]]>More troubling, however, was that the president’s speech revealed why common sense is nonexistent. Mr. Obama wants new laws to tell us how to do things better—when the need is to overhaul old laws to restore freedom of choice and individual responsibility. Up and down the chain of authority, the accumulation of law and entitlements precludes sensible decisions.
Mr. Obama ...
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