Chris Cannon

If you have not read Madeleine L'Engle's"A Swiftly Tilting Planet" to your children, you should. If you have, you will recognize the United States Department of Education building as one of those structures described in the book: cold, gray, artless and heartless socialist edifices where children's souls are "trained" and society is homogenized.But our building has an ironic twist: its entrances are built out with "Little Red School Houses."

In 2001, President Bush expressed a desire to reverse this inattention by freeing school districts from regulation and returning local control to our classrooms by introducing the "No Child Left Behind Act of 2001" (NCLB). Many conservatives, including me, cautiously supported our president's first priority of domestic policy in the hope that decades of stagnation and regulation that epitomized education bureaucracy would yield to the promise of local control and freedom to innovate.The bill, as sold to us, would have done that. Unfortunately for America's kids, America's taxpayers, and America's teachers, it didn't work out.

During the most recent State of the Union address, the president again called for NCLB to be reauthorized and outlined new programs and initiatives.

With all due respect to the president and his administration, enough is enough. According to the Heritage Foundation, NCLB increased state and local governments' annual paperwork burden by about seven million hours.

Since 1965, American taxpayers have invested almost a trillion dollars on federal programs for elementary and secondary education.

Given all that, there is now a compelling case for change. Not tweaking, but radical, substantive, and outside-the-box change.

Famed British Conservative leader Benjamin Disraeli once commented on "how much easier it is to be critical than to be correct."NCLB is an easy target for criticism.But if teachers had a dime for every idea by every politician critical of a federal program, they would all have enough money to retire.

In that vein, allow me to offer a few "radical" changes:

Instant testing: We are all for measuring progress. But NCLB measures once a year, and the results are not available until the following year and not even helpful for the new teacher.In an age when you can TiVo, text-message a vote on "American Idol," or watch fantasy-football scores update in real time, each student should be provided with a device that records his or her answers on progress tests in a system that identifies his or her level of understanding. That should then be automatically compiled, processed and made immediately accessible by teachers and parents.

Technology partnerships: Corporate involvement in education is not a danger. After all, who has a better track record for success, the U.S. Department of Education or Google?Private companies have a stake in success.Government has a stake in self-perpetuation. Educator and writer Laurence Peter said, "Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status."

Freedom to innovate: The Federal government needs to get out of the way. A scientist given the ability to conduct fifty experiments at once would be ecstatic.Likewise, fifty states, hundreds of localities, and thousands of schools competing to see who can come up with the most innovation will result in progress.

We all learn differently.We have new classroom technology that dramatically helps teachers. We have computer and Internet technology that is transformative.Teachers, given the opportunity, will come up with new ways of teaching, maybe going back to some of the "little red school house" ideas that worked, like having advanced students tutor others.

How can we accomplish these changes? To begin, the federal government must scrap the 1,100 pages of NCLB and the tens of thousands of pages of education regulation spewed forth from the belly of a self-perpetuating bureaucracy.Maybe we should just get rid of the Department of Education.

The Education Advisory Committee I recently assembled concluded that the goals underlying NCLB can be realized without a single building, staff member, or bureaucrat in Washington. One thing every family knows is that when you buy something and it is not what it was advertised to be, you can take it back.Congress should begin to "take back" federal "products" that have not panned out.

The federal education Goliath leaves no child behind the same way the Soviet Union eliminated poverty, by setting as the goal the equality of outcome, as opposed to the excellence of outcome -- the proverbial "race to the bottom." Instead, if parents have the freedom to choose teachers for their children and teachers have the ability and tools to determine instantly who is learning and who isn't, we can start racing to the top and bury the excuses.That revolution begins with leaving the Department of Education behind.

• Chris Cannon represents Utah's 3rd District in Congress.