Inside the Washington, D.C., beltway, the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) is seen as either a sea change in federal education policy or a half-measure designed to demonstrate the political leadership's willingness to "do something"on education. There is no genuine opposition in Washington to accountability rules that simply fail to understand the institutional realities of accountability in states, districts, and schools. The author argues that the law's provisions are considerably at odds with the technical realities of test-based accountability. Never in the history of federal education policy, he says, has the disconnect between policy and practice been so evident, and possibly never so dangerous. Particularly strange and ironic is that conservative Republicans control the White House and the House of Representatives, and they sponsored the single largest--and the single most damaging--expansion of federal power over the nation's education system in history. Here, he discusses the many problems with the reauthorization of ESEA.