No Crime Left Behind
On January 8, 2002 President George Bush signed NCLB, The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. He was flanked by cosponsors Ted Kennedy and John Boehner, among others, all wearing ear-to-ear grins because they knew their legislation, which had received nearly unanimous bipartisan support in Congress, would solve all our education problems with the stroke of a pen.
Wasn’t that a wonderful day! By 2014, illiteracy would end (or else). One hundred percent of our students would read and solve math problems at grade level. Children who had never received pre or post-natal care, children who had been malnourished since birth, children who had never been read to, children whose parents had never purchased a book nor bothered to take them to the library, children with significant emotional disturbance, even children with such severe dyslexia that The Catcher in the Rye looks like nothing more than a tangled plateful of
