Because I'm mostly home playing grandpa to a four-year-old this week (and doing my small part to assure that at least one small child is ready to succeed in school and beyond), this must be very brief. To my eye, Randi's explanation is clearer and better balanced than her speech was, maybe because it lacks some of the crowd-pleasing anti-NCLB rhetoric. I'm sorry not to see her even acknowledge that NCLB, for all its flaws, has done at least one good thing for American K-12 schools, which is to focus attention as never before on their academic performance and to shine unprecedented beams of sunlight on that performance. Ending NCLB's focus on standards and assessments would, I fear, place the performance of many U.S. schools back in the cave-like darkness that previously enveloped it. My one other comment to Randi is that the praiseworthy academic performance of the AFT-run charter school in New York that she rightly boasts about seems to have occurred without any new multi-zillion-dollar federal cradle-to-grave social services program--and with all the pressures (for both good and ill) that come with NCLB in its present form.
