There's some good news for those of us who have been concerned with the state of public education in the United States: Education Secretary Rod Paige has declared that "the debate is over" about whether No Child Left Behind is a success. Thank goodness.

Now we can stop worrying about why the federal government has been granted unprecedented power over the states by a president who supposedly represents conservative politics. There need not be any questioning from Republicans who wonder why their vote for Bush has turned into a vote for massive government expansion and fiscal socialism.

We no longer have to bite our nails at the thought of already-neglected subjects like art, music, and social studies being further marginalized by standardized testing. We certainly don't have to lose sleep over the thought of public education being reduced to a 12-year test-prep course.

Thanks to Paige's assertion, practical problems with NCLB transfer system don't need to be a source of unsightly forehead wrinkles any more. This should be a welcome relief for the 240,000 Chicago students who are in schools "in need of improvement," and who will have to compete for transfers to the 1,035 spaces available in the district.

Best of all, there is no longer any need to debate whether it is reasonable to demand that underfunded school systems show improvement on their own, without any substantial increase in resources, and then cut their funding when they fail. The opinions of organizations like the National Education Association, the country's largest teacher's union, can now be ignored with impunity. Granted, Paige has referred to the NEA as a "terrorist organization", but the Bush administration has chosen to emphasize continuity in this year's campaign by encouraging Americans to ignore these NEA terrorists in much the same way we ignore the terrorists in Sudan, Uzbekistan, and Afghanistan.

Thanks, Rod Paige, for putting my mind at ease.