SEATTLE – Citizens of Washington State are learning firsthand that whatever the federal government giveth, it can also taketh away.

The unpleasant revelation came on Thursday when U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced that the Evergreen State is losing its No Child Left Behind waiver because state lawmakers refused to make students’ standardized test scores a consideration in teacher evaluations.

The Obama administration has taken to issuing waivers from the federal education law in exchange for promises of education reform – such as revamped teacher evaluations – from the states. Forty-two states and the District of Columbia have received NCLB waivers.

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NPR.org reports:

“Washington state won’t lose federal dollars, but without a waiver, underperforming schools will have to set aside 20 percent for remedies from ‘private vendors.’ That means schools might have to pay for private tutoring, or transportation of dissatisfied students to other schools. They also run the risk of being declared ‘failing,’ and possibly having staff replaced.”

States with a waiver can use that 20 percent of federal aid for other purposes.

Washington state leaders suggested the loss of spending flexibility could affect 90 percent of schools and lead to teacher layoffs and cuts to student programs, the Associated Press reports.

Republican state Sen. Steve Litzow, who chairs the Senate Education Committee, blames the nullified waiver on the Washington Education Association – the state’s largest teachers union – for its refusal to accept a modernized teacher evaluation system.

“This was easily avoidable,” Litzow told the AP.

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Teacher union leaders and their marionettes in the Democratic Party are trying to deflect criticism by blaming anyone and anything they can think of: Duncan (for being “inflexible”), the No Child Left Behind law (for having unfair expectations of student learning) and the entire U.S. Congress (for failing to replace NCLB with something better).

We have mixed feelings about this story.

On one hand, we support Duncan’s premise that teachers should be held accountable for their students’ performance in the classroom. The old way of evaluating teachers – a biannual classroom observation from the school principal – hardly seems adequate to determine which educators are getting the job done and which ones need to be shown the door.

Using students’ standardized test scores to assess a teacher’s job performance has its flaws, but it’s not any worse than the antiquated system that rates virtually all teachers as “effective.”

Still, we share Washington lawmakers’ distaste for having an unelected bureaucrat in faraway Washington D.C. telling state officials how to manage their education system. That’s not the America our Founders ever envisioned.

Perhaps the answer is that Americans need to do a better job of managing their schools (by standing up to the teacher unions) and choosing representatives who will preserve local and state control of public education.