The Echo

Published Online: November 16, 2010

Republican Leader on Education Pledges to Check Federal Role

Republican Rep. John Kline poses for a portrait in his Burnsville, Minn., office. A deficit hawk and retired Marine pilot, Kline believes it's time to pull Washington out of the nation's classrooms and stop using billions in federal dollars to bail out state education budgets.
Burnsville, Minn.

The smooth flight through Congress that President Barack Obama's education plans enjoyed could soon crash into Republican Rep. John Kline, a deficit hawk and retired Marine pilot who once carried the nation's nuclear launch codes for Ronald Reagan.

The Minnesota Republican expects to take over leadership of the House Education and Labor Committee when Congress reconvenes. He said it's time to pull Washington out of the nation's classrooms and stop using billions in federal dollars to bail out state education budgets.

"We have got to see if there is some way to fix it without putting the federal government in charge of everything," Kline said.

While outgoing committee chairman Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., was considered a natural ally of Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan, Kline's relationship with him promises to be more complicated.

Kline, 63, said he liked Duncan personally and supported many of his policies, especially the ones opposed by teachers unions. "I like charter schools. I like performance pay for teachers," he said, but "there's a lot of tensions we've got to work around."

Those tensions come from Kline's dislike of rising deficits and what he considers the creeping influence of Washington into areas best controlled by states. That friction could flare up when the committee takes up the overhaul of the No Child Left Behind law next year.

The 2002 law championed by President George W. Bush was "the largest intrusion of the federal government in public education, ever," Kline said. "We have bipartisan consensus that we need to fix it."

Obama presented his blueprint for re-writing the law in March with an emphasis on ensuring students are ready for college or a career when they graduate from high school, a departure from the current law's focus on getting students to perform at their grade level by 2014.

But Kline said that plan wasn't the answer because it gave Washington too much power. "It's an important part of the dialogue, but the reforms themselves won't look like the blueprint," he said.

For one thing, he said, Republicans don't like how the plan encourages states to adopt common education standards.

"These national standards too easily morph into national assessments which morph into a national curriculum," he said.

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