A New Name in the Tired, Old No Child Left Behind Debate
I urge you to read This Is Only A Test, Jonathan Kozol’s review in yesterday’s NY Times of Diane Ravitch’s new book, Reign of Error, and then, of course, I encourage you to read (and master the information in) Ravitch’s excellent book.
But having recently read his excellent book review, I am thinking today about Jonathan Kozol, the writer who has again and again created a lens to help us see the plight of America’s children. Kozol brought us “savage inequalities” and “apartheid schooling in America,” for example, terms that have been adopted into common parlance to depict our society’s growing inequality and racial segregation.
In yesterday’s review, Kozol coined a new phrase that stopped me cold. He begins the second paragraph of his book review with this simple declaration: “The pressure intensified in 2002 with the enactment of the federal testing law No Child Left Behind…”
Most of us who write about public education, anxious to be scrupulously precise about the historical facts, have described, “No Child Left Behind, the most recent reauthorization of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act.” I have recently forced myself to feel comfortable shortening it to, “the current version of the federal education law, No Child Left