Momentous changes are occurring in American education at a rapid pace, and with far too little deliberation about their value and likely consequences. The most dramatic, and possibly most significant, is the federal Department of Education's quiet but firm assumption of control of the nation's public schools. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is building on the precedent established by George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind (NCLB) program, which established a strong federal presence in every public school district. NCLB not only required states to create a testing and accountability regime for every public school, but prescribed the sanctions that would apply to schools that did not make adequate yearly progress. NCLB has been a costly disaster. None of its remedies has been successful for turning around a low-performing school. Instead of admitting that NCLB has been an expensive and demoralizing failure, President Obama and Secretary Duncan have accepted its fundamental premise that students must be tested annually and schools and teachers subject to harsh punishment if they are unable to raise test scores. In this article, the author looks at the effects of the Bush and Obama administrations on schools.