A day after receiving a call from a federal Department of Education spokesman, I remain bemused. I’ve been writing about local education issues for eight years, I’ve written 34 times about the federal law dubbed No Child Left Behind since it first hit the education scene in 2001 (it was officially put in place in 2002) and I’ve never had a call from anyone involved in it from the federal end. No one from Fed Ed has ever called me to praise the stories I’ve written in support of NCLB or to castigate me for those agin’ it.

Until yesterday.

Fed Ed was not amused at an “Inside Education” column that ran Monday describing the results of a study Rockland politicians and educators had made of NCLB. The person who called felt that I should have called Washington for their input. Point taken, although the study wasn’t anything they knew about and a copy wasn’t available until Monday.

My column simply outlined what the study said, much as we write about lawsuits: this is what’s officially in the document, the truth may be something different and may only be determined later after a thorough airing in a public arena.

At first, I wondered if the call came because I mentioned education secretary Margaret Spellings, and her name came up on an Internet search, ergo I received a call from the feds.

But then I wondered further. With all due respect to the influence of the Journal News and our relentless education coverage in Rockland, Westchester and Putnam counties, on a national scale we’re fairly small potatoes. Why should the federal government worry so much about what a relatively obscure education columnist puts in a weekly look at local education issues? What prompted that call out of the blue?

Education is a political hotspot; NCLB is the current rallying point. The feds know where educators stand on it—they’ve made their points loudly and a new Democrat-led Congress may be more willing to listen than in the past. With NCLB up for reauthorization in 2007, you have to wonder whether more education writers will be getting calls like the one I got yesterday, either to influence how NCLB is covered in the press or to bully education writers to simply pass on the subject to avoid unpleasantness with Washington.