It’s true that we ask parents to sign a contract indicating that they will check their child’s homework and come up to school for meetings when asked, but I can guarantee from personal experience that we do NOT turn children away when their parents fail to meet those expectations.

My school’s incoming test scores are similar to or lower than those in the surrounding neighborhood, which are in turn the lowest in the city. We do serve a handful of kids who would have been successful anywhere and whose parents chose us carefully and wisely, but we also serve a whole lot of kids — the vast majority, as far as I can tell — who were getting few services and little education where they were before.

Allow me to briefly summarize points (a)-(d):

(a) NCLB is not creating perverse incentives because “plenty of schools” are *not* responding in this way. So policies don’t have effects unless they are generating the effect 100% of the time?

A tax loophole is really not a loophole at all because “plenty of taxpayers” do not take advantage of them? This simply makes no sense.

(b) “Research shows” the best way to raise test scores is to “teach,” not to take shortcuts. Brilliant! Why didn’t we think of this before? This statement is so completely vacuous I’m not even sure how to respond. Is there anything disputable or falsifiable here?

(c) “The best way to teach reading is…” Do we actually know this definitively? If so, can Eduwonk provide some more specific research evidence on this?

(d) Schools are now also examining how they spend their time. That’s a good thing, but there is absolutely no reason why the perverse incentives Eduwonkette describes are at all mutually exclusive activities. Schools can do both, and if the most at-risk schools are the ones disproportionately re-allocating time instead of examining time, then there is still reason for concern.

Eduwonk and readers are free to disagree, but “research shows” that I am correct! See also reports by Me (2007), Me (2006) and Me (2004) that also prove that I am correct.

SWG, my kids are one of the lowest-scoring groups on record when they enter my school, and I am 100% certain that we can teach them to read, because we’re doing it, every day. They’re not crippled. They’ve just been left lying in bed for the first five years of what should have been their elementary education.

They were perfectly bright and normal toddlers — if you don’t believe me, check out the results of the new KIPP elementary schools, whose first and second graders are testing light years ahead of grade level — and the people who let them lie around on the assumption that they were likely incapable of walking deserve to be held accountable.

Never thought I’d be comparing my kids to Colin in The Secret Garden, but there you have it.

Really guys it is very hard to teach someone who is partially crippled to walk. In fact, in such a situation one might find that rehabilitation is prescribed, and if you have the right insurance company, paid for.

But to pretend that one can get a cripple to throw away his crutches by waving hands and praying to God is nuts. To blame the person trying to help the cripple to walk because he does not make adequate yearly progress is obviously crazy. To blame the cripple (read children from poor families) for not being able to walk normally is cruel.

In the present political context, the Iraq war and No Child Left Behind have many similarities. We were going to bring democracy to Iraq, and bring all children up to the same level by 2013-14. No serious person believes this is possible. Just as with Iraq, we are redirecting vast resources to the wrong objectives.

NCLB seems like Project Phoenix for education. Project Phoenix, for those too young or who have forgotten, was our attempt in Vietnam to save the village by destroying it.

NCLB claims to be saving US education, but the public and many careful researchers agree, it may be bringing it down.