WASHINGTON (Map, News) - Prince George’s County schools Superintendent John Deasy stood alongside national educational leaders and politicians on Wednesday to call for a new role for the federal government in public education.

“Right now their role is around regulations and inspections and punishments,” Deasy said, when it should encourage school systems to be “catalytic, innovative, and hold us to consequences.”

Deasy, touted as a reformer for one of the region’s most troubled school districts, distinguished punishment from consequences by saying that the latter involves incentives.

“What does the government do for our teachers who meet or exceed the requirements put upon them? Nothing,” he said, adding that under the its role as dictated by No Child Left Behind, “as schools improve we take money away.”

Currently, Prince George’s has 43 schools in at least the third year of correction under the federal education law, topped only by Baltimore City schools.

What troubles him most, he said, was not the strictures of No Child Left Behind, but his current impossibility of placing a “highly effective” teacher in front of every student in his district.

To deal with a shortage of effective teachers, Prince George’s recently started hiring from a program called Teach for America, which places people with little or no teaching background into the district’s toughest schools after a summer of intensive training.

Deasy joined leaders at all levels of education policy, including congressman and chairman of the House Education Committee George Miller (D-Calif.), in attempting to balance the desire for federal dollars with an equal desire for local control over the funds.

For $29 billion annually, they said, key provisions could be fulfilled that would aid districts by helping train better teachers, provide money to pay off teachers’ college loans, and invest in and disseminate research aimed at bringing American schools back to top positions they last held, by some indicators, in the 1970s.

lfabel@dcexaminer.com