The federal role in education is in greater flux today and beset with more disputes and dilemmas than at any time in the past decade. Since at least the dawn of the 21st century, a rough “Washington Consensus” about education has shaped the core assumptions and basic strategies of both Democratic and Republican policymakers in the White House, the Department of Education, and the Congress. Closing achievement gaps has been the focus. “No excuses” has been the ethos. And standards- and test-based accountability, first encouraged, then coaxed, then more-or-less mandated by Uncle Sam, has been the dominant strategy.

These assumptions are now coming under heavy attack. The Washington Consensus is disintegrating. Both parties’ political bases are fed up with the No Child Left Behind act (NCLB)—the statutory linchpin, high-profile symbol, and main accomplishment of the old consensus. Education progressives and political liberals with ties to the teacher unions and other education groups recoil from the law’s obsession with testing and resist its presumption that schools alone can dramatically improve the life chances of poor children. Conservatives and libertarians abhor NCLB’s expansion of federal control and yearn to return to “first principles” of limited government. Somewhere in the middle are sundry reformers of various stripes, mostly occupying the political center, who are fighting to maintain the major contours of NCLB while fixing its more onerous and less workable provisions.

Navigating this rocky terrain will be a difficult, perhaps impossible, task for President Barack Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. Compromises will be made. New policies will be imperfect. But the advent of a new administration and Congress is unfailingly a time of hope and creativity. It’s a good time to ask, what would the ideal federal role in K-12 education look like?

This question is particularly salient for conservatives. While the national press has lavished attention on the growing schism within the Democratic Party on education, with teachers unions pitted against reformers, there’s a similar divide within the GOP. On one side are what you might call “The Army of the Potomac”—defenders of NCLB who hold strong school reform instincts but also boundless optimism about Washington’s ability to do good in K-12 education. On the other side are the “Local Controllers,” who see NCLB as an aberrant overreach, an unprecedented (and perhaps unconstitutional) foray into the states’ domain.

Presented this way, it appears that conservatives must choose one or the other: federal policies that promote reform but unwisely expand the federal role, or no federal role at all.

But there’s a “third way,” what my colleagues at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and I call “Reform Realism.” We favor a vigorous but realistic federal role that respects what is best done from Washington and for the entire nation while dismissing federal programs, policies and practices that, in our judgment, cannot succeed.

Reform Realists share some core assumptions with both the Army of the Potomac and the Local Controllers. Like the Army, we embrace standards, assessment, and accountability. Like the Local Controllers, we favor school choice in almost all its forms and realize that individual communities, schools, educators and families have variegated needs and differing priorities across this big and diverse land.

So how to bridge the divide? We believe that the federal government should direct funds to needy children; make school results transparent, ideally through a system of national standards and tests; provide financial incentives for states and local school districts to adopt key reforms; generate high-quality research and data; and protect individual civil rights.

Then stop. That’s right. Stop.

That’s plenty for Uncle Sam to tackle, we believe, but it would mean jettisoning major pieces of his current role, including oversight of state testing and reporting systems, mandates regarding school sanctions, and dictates around teacher credentials.

We’re well aware that this is a fundamentally different approach to federal policymaking in K-12 education and only in our dreams do we picture the Obama administration and Democratic leaders of the 111th Congress swiftly embracing it. But it’s a perfect fit for reform-minded conservatives. And it might actually work.