The new federal mandate on public schools may illustrate why the federal government should leave most K-12 education matters to its state counterparts.

A public school “blacklist” issued recently by the U.S. Department of Education illustrates a key weakness of federal regulation of K-12 education.

In Kansas, 118 schools were included on the list of low-performing schools that is part of President Bush’s new education law dubbed the “No Child Left Behind Act.” None of the listed schools is in Lawrence, but several are located in Baldwin, Gardner, Leavenworth and Ottawa.

The new law allows parents of children in low-performing schools to demand that their children be moved to higher-performing schools in the same district. The districts must grant the transfers and provide transportation and other services such as tutoring. The intent of the law seems positive, but there are some obvious flaws.

Primary among those is the fact that while Kansas has 118 schools on the low-performing list, Missouri has 63, Louisiana has only 24 and Arkansas has none. No offense to the other states, but how can that be? Kansas City, Mo., schools lost their accreditation recently, and neither Louisiana nor Arkansas has sterling reputations for public education.

Well the answer is that the “No Child Left Behind” list only measures schools against their state standards. States with low standards will have fewer schools on the list. States with high standards will have more. So, with no consideration for how the state standards compare with one another, officials in Washington are sounding the alarm about schools in Kansas, while showing no concern about schools in Arkansas. The reality is that many of the Kansas schools that were listed probably are far superior to Arkansas schools that weren’t.

The federal government’s efforts to impose a national mandate on schools whose educational standards are set by the states makes little sense. It is not unlike the federal mandates on special education, which require states to provide services to children with special needs but offer no funding to make that possible.

It used to be that public schools were a purely local affair. Local school boards were responsible for one school and one staff. With the increasingly mobile population it has made sense to combine schools into districts that cover entire cities or counties. Setting state standards has helped ensure the quality of public education throughout the state and helped students prepare to attend state universities. But federal mandates to states about public education still seem to be missing the mark.

Instead of producing more meaningless mandates like the recent blacklist, federal officials might do better to spend their time finding ways to help financially strapped states pay for existing mandates like special education.