Wm Spady on NCLB

Well worth reading -

The Paradigm Trap: Getting beyond No Child Left Behind will mean changing our 19th-century, closed-system mind-set.
By William Spady

If you don’t like the federal No Child Left Behind Act, don’t blame President Bush, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, Rep. George Miller, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, or her predecessor, Rod Paige. Well, not entirely anyway. And if you’re a supporter of the legislation, which the president signed into law five years ago this week, this is an opportunity to rethink your assumptions about its nature, purpose, and potential impact. As the nation’s premier education law heads toward its scheduled reauthorization this year, here are some thoughts on its history and impact to consider.

Continued at: http://www.edweek.org//ew/articles/2007/01/10/18spady.h26.html

Spady writes about the "Great Regression" that has lead us to NCLB, comprised of four phases:

1. Endorsing A Nation at Risk
2. Encouraging the Standards Bandwagon
3. Endorsing the Testing-and-Accouintability Juggernaut
4. Ignoring the Evidence on the Ground

 And you have to love his conclusion:

From intellectual embarrassment, to operational travesty, to national tragedy in 20 short years—quite remarkable for something we’ve seen as a reform movement. But the ability of the No Child Left Behind law’s chief advocates to ignore all this is even more remarkable. They wrap themselves in the patriotic mantle of educentric excellence and standards; pursue their goal of imposing a narrow, standardized, assembly-line, one-size-fits-all system of testing and accountability on every child, educator, and school in the country; and relentlessly move America and its education system toward the greatest box of all: the total-control box.
And if they succeed, we really will be a nation at risk.