Tough political campaigns call for drastic measures. This is especially clear these days when it comes to the Obama administration, and President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign effort. Both the campaign and administration are doing a fine job of weakening the president’s otherwise-solid record as school reformer-in-chief in order to win a tough fight against Republican presidential nominee presumptive Mitt Romney to retain the White House. With the campaign’s latest ad accusing Romney’s running mate, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, of proposing budget cuts that would increase class sizes, the president is essentially distancing himself from the administration’s own sensible proclamations that American public education will have to embrace a “new normal” of spending less and maximizing efficiency after decades of increases without resulting improvements in student achievement. [The fact that the administration has also essentially conceded in the past the evidence showing that smaller class sizes do little to improve student performance for all but the poorest students — and even that is questionable — makes it clear that the president is talking out of both sides of his mouth.]

Obama’s move last week to resuscitate the American Jobs Act, which would toss another $30 billion to traditional districts in order to supposedly keep teachers and other bureaucrats from being laid off (along with another $25 billion in school construction spending), shows that the administration hasn’t learned the lesson from past failures on this front. Throughout Obama’s tenure, the administration has poured plenty of such stimulus into districts, including the $10 billion through the Edujobs teachers’ union payoff plan passed two years ago. Yet few states ever spent those dollars, and even fewer of the supposed layoffs ever came. The layoffs that did happened added up to a mere 1.6 percent of the 6.2 million people employed by American public education — a pittance compared to the millions laid off in the private sector — and almost never involved teachers. Because districts, mindful of their oft-servile relationships with National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers affiliates, often pull out the stops to keep teachers on the payroll, either by not filling open positions in or cutting expenditures in other areas. Another $95 billion handed out by the administration to districts through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has also been largely wasted, with districts such as Houston keeping teachers and other staff on payrolls despite declines in enrollment, while districts in general refused to devote those one-time dollars to launching any reforms. All in all, the Obama administration has wasted $105 billion in federal dollars to bail out districts (and more importantly, teachers’ unions) with almost nothing to show for it.

Certainly these missteps have weakened the Obama administration’s record of success on the one issue that has garnered him some bipartisan support. But the biggest misstep — and one that the school reform movement is starting to regret — lies not with any of the administration’s efforts to win re-election. Instead, they lie with the administration’s effort to eviscerate the No Child Left Behind Act and the Adequate Yearly Progress provisions that have helped spur a decade of reforms (including those launched by Obama’s administration such as Race to the Top). As Dropout Nation has pointed out in the past few months, Obama and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan have managed to define proficiency down by allowing states to replace AYP with supposedly “ambitious” yet “achievable” proficiency targets that allow districts to damn poor and minority kids (and all children) to low expectations. As a result, states such as Tennessee are allowing traditional districts to get away with low bar goals, such as ensuring that 42.8 percent of black high school students are proficient in Algebra I during the 2012-2013 school year,  some 20 percentage points lower than the rate of proficiency for white peers (and eventually getting to two-thirds of all black high school students, still 15 points lower than for white schoolmates). It is why Virginia, long one of the least-willing to embrace reform, can now get away with proficiency targets that only require districts to ensure that 57 percent of black students (and 65 percent of Latino peers) are proficient in math by 2016-2017. [Thanks to outrage from groups such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s Old Dominion branch, which laudably pushed back against those low expectations, Virginia is now revising its AMO targets.]

Another problem with the waivers is that some states aren’t even using those targets to hold districts accountable. As pointed out to Dropout Nation by Jeremy Ayers of Center for American Progress, three states  are essentially not using either the goals stated in their waiver plans (or the accountability systems they have developed to meet them) to hold districts and schools accountable for performance. This essentially means that the goals they agreed to meet in exchange for ditching AYP are meaningless.

In fact, North Carolina is the only state that has done a decent job of aligning its goals for reforming education with its accountability system. Others have been less successful on this count. Virginia, for example, mostly holds districts and schools accountable based on what are generally shoddy accreditation standards; essentially using the goals in order to seem like it’s trying to advance systemic reform. Given that this double-talk is now being allowed by the administration, expect other states to attempt the same trick.

Another issue that has cropped up lies with how states would track the priority schools, or five percent or more of the dropout factories and failure mills. Four states granted waivers — Ohio, North Carolina, Maryland, and Wisconsin — would only track the progress of those schools every three-to-four years, effectively allowing failing schools to escape scrutiny for up to a third of the academic careers of the kids in their care. North Carolina and Ohio will also monitor focus, schools with wide racial-, ethnic-, economic-, and gender-based achievement gaps, every three years. For poor and minority kids in those states, it means even lower expectations for their futures.

The resulting shoddiness of these accountability systems isn’t shocking. After all, as Dropout Nation has noted for the past few months, the Obama administration has been granting waivers to states even when the states haven’t fully implemented their proposed efforts or even only have them in pilot stages. In May, the administration granted Ohio a waiver even though it has not formally put a accountability system in place; while the feds can let the waiver lapse if the Buckeye State fails to put it in place, while Connecticut was granted a waiver even though much of the state’s reform efforts will only be in pilot stages that will only cover just a smattering of districts and the students they serve, leaving most of the state’s children still stuck with failure. And last month, it granted a waiver to Oregon even though its proposed teacher evaluation overhaul is not even in place (and would still be in a pilot phase); U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Education Michael Yudin said that the state was given a waiver anyway because the state “committed to student growth”, and not because there was a real plan in place.

The Obama administration is also granting waivers without paying attention to what is happening inside the states to which waivers have been granted. The fact that several states, including New York, Oregon, Michigan and Kansas have gained waivers without either having put their teacher evaluation plans in place, only rolling them out in a pilot format, or requiring districts to reach agreements with American Federation of Teachers and National Education Association affiliates (and thus leaving the possibility that the plans will be scuttled by their opposition to using objective student performance data in performance reviews) shows that the administration has lowered the high bar for reform it had set for earlier rounds of Race to the Top and other efforts.

Again, this isn’t surprising. The Obama administration’s move to eviscerate No Child’s Adequate Yearly Progress provisions is taking away real data on school performance, making it more difficult for families from being the lead decision-makers reformers need in order for overhauls to gain traction, and making it more difficult for researchers to do their work. It will also make it difficult for reformers and reform-minded politicians to hold districts and schools accountable for failure, hindering efforts to overhaul failure mills and dropout factories. And in blessing moves to replace subgroup accountability with A-to-F grading systems and “super-subgroup” measures, schools and districts can ignore their obligations toward the poor and minority kids in their classrooms and still appear to be exemplary.

The consequences of Obama’s and Duncan’s thoughtlessness is clear. It has weakened its own hand without moving forward its reform agenda; a terrible consequence for the administration’s future efforts if the president wins re-election. Through the waiver gambit, Obama and Duncan have granted longtime opponents of systemic reform and House Education and the Workforce Committee Chairman John Kline exactly what they really want — gutting accountability — without having to actually do the job themselves. Although many of them, especially Kline and the movement conservatives to which he plays up, may find the entire process legally questionable (because states are being allowed to ignore whole sections of federal law), the waiver gambit also allows them to sidestep a full public debate over what ditching No Child would mean for addressing the nation’s education crisis, and deal with the consequences of laying out their positions in full view).

By engaging in the waiver gambit, Obama and Duncan have also weakened the president’s record on the one aspect of his presidency that has been both the most-successful and has generally enjoyed bipartisan favor. This (along with the president’s woeful record on economic issues)  has also helped Republican presidential nominee presumptive Mitt Romney stay apace in spite of his reputation for being overly flexible on political positions.

The president is in for a tough re-election. And he hasn’t made it easier for himself by weakening his own successes on the school reform front with a waiver gambit that was never ready for prime time.