The 74 Million – Conor Williams
“Usually education policy experts live in a bubble. We think for a while, develop a clever pet theory, flesh it out, and spend our careers misunderstanding politics through that particular lens. As a result, the education system we see is alien to the one that most Americans experience. The things we think are important rarely matter at all to students and parents across the country. That’s why it’s so remarkable that everyone — well-adjusted adults and education policy wonks alike — agrees that No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is broken. And they even mostly agree on how it’s broken. It reduces local control in favor of federal mandates. It narrows the curriculum. Standardized testing is bad. I’ve been thinking about this a lot during the latest effort to replace NCLB. And as I’ve been visiting schools all over the country (part of a conscious effort to avoid the aforementioned narrowness of viewpoint), I’ve started to realize something: NCLB is kinda working.”(more)