Obama’s Ed-Run . The Administration tries to dictate state and local school funding.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

President Obama has no inhibitions about rewriting laws he doesn’t like—even those he’s signed. Witness the Administration’s revision of the Every Student Succeeds Act to allow the feds to regulate state and local school spending.

The law—which passed Congress last year with large bipartisan majorities—devolved power to the states and rolled back some federal mandates. In doing so, Congress rebuffed the White House’s previous attempts to direct local education policy with No Child Left Behind waivers.

Mr. Obama nonetheless hailed the law as a civil-rights success that “reflects many of the priorities of this administration.” One notable achievement was giving local school districts more discretion over Title I funds, which target poor students. Federal policy dating to 1970 requires that Title I funds must supplement, rather than supplant, state and local spending.

This requirement isn’t controversial, but school districts still complained that the cost of completing the federal paperwork to comply diverted resources from instruction. Congress eased the burden by letting school districts establish their own methodology to show compliance. The law also prohibited the Secretary of Education from prescribing the “specific methodology a local educational agency uses to allocate State and local funds” or mandating “equalized spending per pupil for a State, local educational agency, or school.”

The Administration is now rewriting the parts of the law it doesn’t like. The Education Department recently proposed assessing the local school district’s compliance with the law by whether a Title I school “receives at least as much in State and local funding as the average non-Title I school.” In other words, the Administration is trying to do exactly what the law prohibits it from doing.

You'll want to read the entire editorial.