When Lessons From Education 'Reform' Go Unlearned
One good thing you can say about 2011 is that it is a year in which lots of wrong-headed undertakings finally came to their ignominious conclusions -- including, among others, the Iraq War, the Gadhafi regime, the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump, and "The Oprah Winfrey Show".
Also among the train-wrecks is undoubtedly our failed national education policy, No Child Left Behind.
Maybe our country has learned some valuable lessons from the fallout of some of the events of 2011. Perhaps we've learned that ground wars in the Middle East are a dead-end, that people will eventually rebel and overthrow repressive governments, that presidential elections have yet to descend to the levels of reality TV, and that many of our most popular celebrities are long past their shelf life.
So what have we learned from the failure of NCLB?
Yes, NCLB Was a Failure
First, not everyone agrees that NCLB was a failure. Just last week, as reported in the education trade newspaper