On The Media

Whether or not NCLB is effective in its mission is distantly secondary to the question of Constitutionality. Where, please, is the enumerated federal authority required to usurp 10th Amendment-guaranteed state control over education? This is the fundamental, inescapable problem with NCLB, and you didn't even mention it in passing.

For the protection of the states' and the people's inherent rights, the Constitution is the federal government's own unwavering constraining law. That the NCLB debate, like so many others, has been so effectively stripped of this crucial consideration is distressing testament to the accelerating loss of the intended Republic and the consistent rule of law.

It would have been good to identify Russo as a full-bore advocate of the neo-conish faction that supports NCLB.

Another approach might be to look at NCLB in light of the failures of reporting on the wars in Vietnam (Halberstam) and Iraq (can't count 'em all).

Knowing nothing about the culture you intend to blow-up and having no sense of unintended consequences, you blunder ahead with profound self-confidence. Russo travels with the spirits of Rostow and Wolfowitz.

Well there are people who know public education and those who have studied change in it (David Tyack would be a good interview on this one) who could have foretold almost the entire story of evasion, duplicity, revolt of the dirty workers, heightened class differences, and more. There are folks who could at least theorize about the partisan political and economic benefit to some of seeing heavily unionized (and hugely imperfect) urban district implode.

But reporters failed on this as in those war stories. They either never asked or did he said-she said, with lots of deference to the folks in windowless offices in Washington.

Bob Garfield states: "But No Child has been buffeted by criticism almost from the beginning and now is unlikely to be reauthorized by Congress in its current form."

Actually, NCLB came under criticism before it began. The preface of "Assessing Mathematical Proficiency" (a book which is the outcome of a conference attended by mathematicians, mathematics education researchers, teachers, test developers, and policymakers) states:

"Even before the advent of the No Child Left Behind legislation, various professional societies cautioned about the use of a single test score as the sole determinant of student success or failure: see, for example the position paper by the American Educational Research Association [AERA 2000] and the updated paper by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics [NCTM 2006]."

All of these are available on the Web.

Assessing Mathematical Proficiency:

http://www.msri.org/communications/books/Book53/contents.html

AERA position statement on high-stakes testing:

http://www.aera.net/policyandprograms/?id=378

NCTM position on high-stakes tests:

http://www.nctm.org/about/content.aspx?id=6356

As an educator who has done duty both in public schools and in higher education, I was intrigued by Mr. Russo's assertion that disgruntled superintendents, principals, parents, and teachers were the most oft-quoted in regards to NCLB. Well, these were the people MOST affected by the law - why shouldn't they be asked their opinion? And his analogy to asking doctors in hospitals about health care legislation is equally puzzling - who would one ask? Insurance industry spokespersons?! The answer in Russo's apologist stance on NCLB lies partially in his being a columnist for Scholastic, which has enjoyed a very lucrative past seven years because of that very legislation.

Since OTM rarely takes on education reporting, I wish they had not relied on Russo alone for this story. The comments posted earlier were easy to predict, though even more over the top than Russo can be on his blog. But I can't imagine why anyone would disagree that reporters should seek out a wider range of sources for stories on NCLB. And Lee, Russo implies that parents are not always disgruntled with the law -- your assertion indicates otherwise.