AFT & NCLB, Breaking Up? Breaking News?

Education Week’s David Hoff smells a lot of news in new AFT Prez Randi Weingarten’s pushback on NCLB…but I’m not sure it is especially newsy (hell, the AFT started a blog about this…) although the rhetoric is sharper than in the past but that’s more a function of the times, not The Times…okay maybe a little bit of that, too.  Anyway, regardless, it’s smart internal politics on Weingarten’s part, she’s going to have to manage the political challenges of reform deftly.  And because the basic contours of No Child Left Behind reauthorization are relatively clear —  there is a fair amount of path dependency in federal education policy — this is sort of a freebie.