Leave NCLB Behind

Matthew Yglesias is blogtopia's (y!sctp!) best and brightest. He's Harvard-educated, and as well as being an A-list liberal blogger, he writes for The American Prospect. He lives in Washington, D.C. He is, in effect, a junior member of the commentariat and will eventually graduate to the weekend talking-head shows as a molder and shaper of opinion.

And he is apparently subject to the ills to which the commentariat within the Beltway is prey. Here he is, writing on the upcoming renewal of No Child Left Behind legislation:

Education Policy for the Paranoid

A lot of people look at the No Child Left Behind Act's requirement of "100 proficiency" and smell a rat; an obviously impossible goal. I would read Richard Rothstein's "'Proficiency for All': An Oxymoron" for a detailed explication of this view. Then many, including Kevin Drum, move from this to a paranoid account of the motives behind the provision. "What incentive does anyone have to label 99% of America's public schools as failures?" he asks, "That's crazy, isn't it?"

Answer: Anyone who wants the public to believe that public schools are failures. This would primarily consist of conservatives who want to break teachers unions and evangelicals who want to build political momentum for private school vouchers. The whole point of NCLB for these people is to make sure that as many public schools as possible are officially deemed failures.

I'll happily agree that this provision seems somewhat ill-advised to me. However, the "secret plot to destroy public schools" account of the whole point of NCLB has some problems. Does Kevin really expect me to believe that this is what Ted Kennedy and George Miller, the law's leading Democratic supporters in the Senate and the House, are up to? These are big-time liberals. Perhaps they're wrong — Kennedy's certainly not above criticism — but it's absurd to think that they're leading agents behind an enterprise whose whole point is to dismantle the public school system.

Why are prominent liberal Democrats identified as supporters of No Child Left Behind? For precisely the same reason that prominent liberal Democrats voted to give Bush war powers in Iraq: They were suckered.

Just about everyone working in the trenches of public education agrees: NCLB sets up schools, even the best schools, to fail. Then it publicly flags them as failures, and cuts them off from resources they need to succeed, so that they fail even harder next time. It is no secret that the conservative agenda is to cripple public education.

It isn't paranoia when they really are out to get you. The Bush Administration is a Control Fraud swindle. Anything they have done, especially if it has a high legislative profile like NCLB, should be presumed to be part of the swindle unless proven otherwise.

I would be a fool to make a medical diagnosis from a blog post, so I won't flat-out say that Yglesias is suffering from Beltway Blindness, the occupational hazard of all Washington pundits that greatly inhibits their ability to see things outside the Beltway as they really are. But I would like to warn him: Matt, try to get out into the real world, spend some time with real people. Just Say No to Cocktail Weenies! You don't want to wind up like David Broder, do you?