President Obama’s proposed revisions to his predecessor’s No Child Left Behind law appear, on the surface, to offer an example not of local control but of more federal intervention. Yet many experts agree that the main reason President George W. Bush’s original law has failed to raise student achievement significantly is that states have dumbed down their exams. Diana Senechal, a former New York City teacher, demonstrated this in an inventive fashion when she showed that anyone could pass New York’s middle-school promotion examinations by simply ignoring the questions and answering, “A, B, C, D, A, B, C, D” in order.

The new proposals being offered by the Obama administration will not significantly change a setup that combines the worst of both worlds: broad federally mandated goals and state manipulation of testing and curriculum. Nationwide testing is useless unless it is based on a curriculum consensus reached by genuine experts in the subjects being taught  yes, the dreaded “elites.” That is how public education is administered in nearly all industrialized nations throughout Europe and Asia, whose students regularly outperform Americans in reading comprehension, science and math.

By contrast, the Texas board’s social studies revision forms a blueprint for bad educational decision-making. Chosen in partisan elections, the board members  most lacking any expertise in the academic subjects upon which they are passing judgment  had already watered down the teaching of evolution in science classes when they turned their attention to American and world history. Thus was Jefferson cut from a list of those whose writings inspired 18th- and 19th-century revolutions, and replaced by Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and William Blackstone. This is certainly the first time I’ve ever heard the “Summa Theologica” described as a spur to any revolution.

No Frenchman could conceive of a situation in which school officials in Marseille decide they don’t like France’s secular government and are going to use textbooks that ignore the Napoleonic code (and perhaps attribute the principles of French law to Aquinas). But publishers will have to comply with Texas requirements in order to sell history books to that state’s huge school system. Indeed, they will likely start producing one edition for conservative states and another for the saner precincts of American schooling.

That is exactly why local control of schools is often an enemy of high-quality public education. The real question is whether anything, in the current polarized political climate, can be done about educational disparities that are inseparable from our fragmented system of public schooling. I can imagine at least three baby steps that would pave the way for success.