Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced on Friday that he will soon be granting waivers to selected states exempting them from the reading and math proficiency requirements of No Child Left Behind, former President George W. Bush’s signature accomplishment in education reform. According to Duncan, as many as 82 percent of U.S. schools could be deemed to be failing this year under standards established by NCLB. “The states are desperately asking for us to respond,” Duncan told reporters via conference call. States are, in fact, clamoring for relief from the law’s burdensome regulations. But there is just one small problem in Duncan’s plan: There is no legal basis for it. To be sure, NCLB is unpopular among many liberal and conservative education policy experts. It requires states to identify “annual yearly progress” targets for standardized reading and math scores, and then labels schools that miss those targets as “failing.” By 2014, 100 percent of all students must be proficient in reading and math or schools that fall short will suffer severe federal sanctions.

Liberals relish NCLB’s emphasis on federal direction of education policy, but they dislike the law’s focus on standardized testing. That allies them with teachers unions, which hate anything that holds their members accountable for how well children learn in their classrooms. For their part, conservatives believe local school districts should be free from federal interference and reject the burdensome paperwork that comes with NCLB funding. There is bipartisan consensus for repealing NCLB in Congress, but Obama has yet to propose a replacement during his nearly three years in the Oval Office.