WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senator Lamar Alexander is emerging as U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s biggest critic.

On Wednesday, the Republican lawmaker from Tennessee asked Duncan to explain how the federal government’s list of requirement for states to follow in order to earn a waiver from the No Child Left Behind law doesn’t establish the U.S. Department of Education as a kind of “national school board.”

(Note: School boards are the legal bodies charged with creating education policies for their local schools.)

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“Please explain to me how using your waiver authority to place conditions on states about common standards, about performance targets, about teacher evaluation systems that are not otherwise required by federal law and in the case of standards, in my opinion, is prohibited by the law — how does that not amount to, in effect, a national school board?” Alexander asked during a Senate subcommittee hearing, according to a press release.

Duncan lamely responded that states have flexibility to figure out how they’re going to meet the various waiver requirements, and likened the federal government’s role as a partner to the states, reports Education Week’s Alyson Klein.

Alexander – who wasn’t challenging Duncan’s authority to issue waivers – compared the series of rules that states must comply with before receiving a No Child Left Behind waiver to the old children’s game “Mother, May I?”:

“The child says ‘Mother, may I go outside and play?’ and you say ‘Yes, you may, but you need to sweep the floor, and make your bed, and cook the breakfast and go to school, and do your homework, and be nice to your father and do all these things.’ And the child says, ‘I didn’t ask about that,’ and the mother says, ‘Well, that’s what you have to do.’”

Alexander also warned the nation’s top education official that the Obama administration’s K-12 policy overreach is undercutting other education reform efforts, including the effort to link a teacher’s job review to student learning.

The senator said Duncan’s aggressive policies have created “a backlash among conservatives who don’t like the federal government involved” in public education and a “backlash among teachers’ unions who don’t want any form of student achievement related to teacher evaluation.”

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“You’re undermining, I’m afraid, the very high standards and teacher evaluation systems that both of us want,” Alexander said. “In other words, I think the way to get where both of us would like to go is not by ordering it from here, but by letting the governors and the states have the responsibility to act.”

He continued:

“We agree that we want higher standards for our 100,000 public schools. We agree that teacher evaluation based on student performance is sort of the holy grail of elementary and secondary education. Where I’m afraid we disagree is that I believe that’s a state and local responsibility and you believe it can be required from Washington.”

Alexander’s arguments against “fed ed” are powerful because they’re simple and easy for non-policy wonks to understand. Common Core opponents would do well to study the senator’s methods and emulate them in as they continue to push back against the nationalized learning standards.