No Child Left Behind just celebrated it’s tenth anniversary: while educators, children and parents have generally loathed President George W. Bush’s signature legislation, and while studies have shown that it has failed to improve learning despite its immense cost, NCLB’s free-market policies – high-stakes standardized testing, and school closures for “losers” – are the undisputed status quo of school reform. President Barack Obama’s Race to the Top places even more faith in the magical power of the free market than NCLB: student scores on standardized tests continue to close schools, to pit states against one another for funding, and soon, pit teachers against one another for jobs. Even though the data shows that NCLB is a failure, our leaders – on both sides of the aisle – have invested too much time, money and pride in free-market reforms to admit that they have failed; and further, we’re all pretty certain that this wide scale experiment in deregulating public education will work out favorably someday (just as it did in the banking industry).
I mean, what’s the alternative to letting hedge fund managers, CEOs,
