By Robert Weissberg
That education reform is back in the national news once more sadly illustrates our fascination with trying to square circles while wasting hundreds of millions, if not billions. The latest incarnation is President Obama's altering of President Bush's failed 2002 No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law.
In a nutshell, the Department of Education will now grant states greater autonomy (plus up to $1 billion) if they agree to overhaul low-performing schools and impose more rigorous teacher evaluations. Gone will be the unfeasible mandates to make all students proficient in math and reading by 2014. Moreover, unlike the dumbing-down-friendly NCLB, the latest rhetoric speaks of promoting academic excellence, especially prodding schools to have "college and career ready" standards.
Escaping the dysfunctional NCLB is certainly good news for many professional educators and parents, but like every other recent alleged panacea, Obama's fix will fail it since it ignores the one feature of American education that dares not speak its name in public: the intellectual quality of students.
If reformers insisted on transforming all ordinary kids into world-class athletes, this would be a joke, since everybody would know the truth. But when it comes to upping academic performance, nothing is said about individual ability or motivation; the culprit is always something else, and this avoidance of reality applies across the entire ideological spectrum. Better to waste billions and fail than speak frankly. More...
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