This Week In Education NCLB: A Timely Reminder From The Past

This Week In Education

NCLB: A Timely Reminder From The Past

by Alexander Russo

Reading Testing Limits, Nick Lemann’s 2001 New Yorker story about NCLB (from my Biggest Education Stories Of The NCLB Era entry last week) is like opening a time capsule from the not so distant past. So much optimism. So many early successes. So many problems, known and unknown. So many things (no hearings!?) you may have forgotten. It's an extremely useful reminder of how school reform gets done and a good thing to consider as reform moves forward via RTTT, FY11 appropriations, and – eventually – NCLB reauthorization.Read on for a refresher.

Written while NCLB was still in conference, the Lemann article criticizes Bush I and Clinton for having done little on education despite their grand claims, describes the standards movement as having come out of the South, “America’s Third World,” and slaps hard at upper middle-class parents of Scarsdale and elsewhere who considered their kids “little geniuses” too good to take annual tests.
The piece also predicts accurately the dangers and pitfalls awaiting the law when it came time for implementation: potential dumbing-down of state standards, lack of comparability across states, perceptions