In my opinion, the federal government needs to stay out of education. They think to much about the big picture, and forget all the little stuff. You can not make effective changes to the education system country wide. The education system should be completely taken care of at a local level, at most the state level. At a lower level you can find id the problems easier and fix them.
As someone else said fixing the school system starts first by fixing the problem children have at home. Putting federal regulations do not help all the way down to that level.