a silly statement by Brooks:

"No Child Left Behind has its problems, but it has ushered in a data revolution, and hard data is the prerequisite for change."

The fact is there were plenty of data before NCLB. And you know what? If anything, the data show that improvement by several criteria -- achievement as measured by test scores, closing the gap between whites and minorities on tests -- slowed after NCLB. That's right, NCLB is a failure failed by its own lights.

And what's with Brooks, supposedly a conservative, siding with the ongoing federal takeover of K-12 education? Is there the slightest evidence that this "reform" is doing any good?

"siding with the ongoing federal takeover of K-12 education?"...federal money for education is not exactly a new thing. Seems to me it is highly imprudent for the federal government to hand out money for education (or anything else) without standards of performance and accountability for how that money is spent.

Brooks has an amazingly dull mind. He splits a debate engaged from countless positions into a simplistic dualism -- status-quo vs. reform -- and then concludes that Obama must be in an ideological muddle because he doesn't carve the debate into the same simplistic dualism.

Walk into any school, talk to any group of teachers, and you'll encounter an amazing panoply of takes on education. The so-called status-quo does not adhere to a unified position paper. And the reformers seek to transform education from a vast spectrum of ideological positions, ranging from libertarian futurists to junk Marxist social crusaders to tweed-suit spare-the-rod-atarians.

Might Obama at once support unions *and* want accountability? Might he not support the end of accountability and testing while rightly criticizing the stupidity of NCLB's means? Might he -- wait for it -- think that children can fail both because of poor teaching and horrible living conditions? (Might he not suspect that so often schools in bad neighborhoods find it hard to attract the most talented teachers, that the two issues go hand in hand, even if simpletons like Brooks insist on either/ors that, in Jay-Z's phrase, couldn't burst a grape in a fruit fight?) And might Obama not address certain local issues (how to fire school employees) because to do so would mean getting instantly labeled a liberal facist control freak?

Erin,
Why limit your marvelous description to just his stance on education. Expand it to cover HIM:

Obama's slick, chic, attractive, adjustable, accessible without being terribly substantive; he dabbles without depth and changes as the wind does; he's hard to pin down, but he looks good, and he seems, on the surface, to have a bit of substance; he appears to be oriented around reform--but when you get right down to it, he's utterly embedded in and indebted to the establishment.

Federal money for education is not new, but NCLB represented a breathtaking power grab. Basically, the federal government is setting the curriculum for the whole country now. With a very modest input of funds, I might add.

Of course, there should be accountability, but NCLB is the dumbest kind of accountability.

There is also accountability for dumb government moves. I hope that those responsible for NCLB will get their heads handed to them come November.

The NCLB represents the Bush administration's attempt to reform K-12 education by playing to the political center--that is, attempting to lure liberals on education policy with money allocated to states and administered through a federal bureaucracy while trying also to attract conservatives with accountability measures based on test scores and demographic tracking statistics. I'm not acquainted with Mike's sources for his extravagant claims the NCLB has actually exacerbated the problems it was designed to correct, but I do detect the familiar odor of invincible parti pris negativism toward any Bush administration program.

Familiar also is the claim that the NCLB's federal trough is just too small for the multitudes of hungry "educrat" snouts. How such venal educators and their political mouthpieces could have sustained this mantra-like drone ("not enough . . . never enough . . .") for decades--during which US expenditures per pupil have been among the world's highest yet results among industrialized- world nations the most pitiful--merely demonstrates their rhetorical tenacity, not their commitment to real change or reform (e.g., taking on the teachers' unions and ed shakedown mafias, establishing voucher systems, etc.).

Empty rhetoric about change and reform coupled with threadbare and baseless appeals for more federal money for more programs has found its best ad-lib expositor in the empty vessel that is Barack Obama.

J.A. DeLater -- you really need to learn to read what other people write, rather than reading in what you want to imagine them to say.

I didn't say that NCLB "exacerbated the problems". Here is what I said:

"the data show that improvement by several criteria -- achievement as measured by test scores, closing the gap between whites and minorities on tests -- slowed after NCLB."

That's right, "improvement". I'm not aware that that is a synonym for "exacerbation". Test scores were improving before NCLB. The rate of improvement slowed down after NCLB. Where did I get that? A nice graph in the Wall St. Journal a few months back. Is that an odoriferous source from the educrat (pig)pen? I guess I stand exposed.

You also completely misread my point about federal money. It is that federal support for K-12 schools is actually a rather small proportion of their budgets. That the federal government has leveraged a relatively small contribution into unprecedented and unwarranted control. Does that sound like a brief from an educrat for more federal money? I would think that could have come from Ronald Reagan or even Barry Goldwater. But I guess conservatism has changed over the years, and it no longer qualifies.

By the way I voted twice for Bush, and will probably hold my nose and vote for McCain. But if it was just a matter of support for NCLB, I would vote for Obama.

Is Obama merely an empty vessel? Then Republicans and conservatives don't have that much to fear. Somehow, I detect some agitation in the barnyard, and not just in the pigpen.

My response to Mike's claims about the failure of the NCLB was to the implication that the NCLB had somehow slowed the rate of progress on general test scores and on minorities' test performances in particular, or in other words, retarded the rate of progress, or in other other words, exacerbated the problem. Perhaps he meant to say only that it's a failure because it's ineffectual and intrusive.

And on the money issue, I thought Mike referred to the numerous complaints issued by state departments of education that the US Department of Education's grants to states to administer the tests and collect the data were too small. Apparently he meant the total federal contribution.

The odd part of this is that I too have had misgivings about the NCLB and even about the shaky constitutional grounds for federal funding and control of K-12 education at all.

I'd be interested in knowing what measures of accountability Mike favors ("Of course, there should be accountability . . ."), but perhaps I just didn't read him closely enough. . ..

"it's a failure because it's ineffectual and intrusive."

I would say that's a fair summary. Whether NCLB is what has slowed the rate of progress (on the NAEP tests, that's the WSJ graph I was referring to, it's easy to find graphs like it on the web), I wouldn't dare to say, but it certainly doesn't seem to have helped, which means that it isn't demonstrably achieving its goals.

On money: I was referring to the total federal contribution. It's a surprisingly small fraction of total K-12 spending. The fraction probably has gone up with the help of the Bush administration, another reason for conservatives not to be thrilled with Bush.

Most of the money seems to go for "special situations" e.g. "special needs" students, low-income districts plus "innovations" like NCLB, special math and reading programs, etc etc. Perhaps some of this, especially the special education and low-income is worthwhile. A lot of it I think is not, or is harmful.

How one makes these programs "accountable" is a tough question, except that the money redistribution is pretty straightforward, a matter mostly of making sure the money is spent as intended. I'm not a huge fan of gearing everything to national tests, which seems to be the best that anyone has come up with. I grew up in the era when the attitude was pretty much have good schools, pretty traditional schools with some beefing up of math and science, and the tests will take care of themselves. Then along came a big "reform" push and the test scores went over the edge.

NCLB has sort of hoist itself on its own petard. i.e. the obsession with test performance and the relative performance of different ethnic and racial groups, especially the abysmal performance of certain groups. (The latter is mostly what NCLB was about, in my opinion).

As I said in my original post, BY ITS OWN LIGHTS the NCLB program has been unsuccessful. And you don't have to get this from the NEA or AFT; Charles Murrary has written about this, or one can just look at the NAEP data and draw one's own conclusions.

So by all means, let's have accountability. If NCLB had been a shining success, I would be happy to give up my original misgivings about it. But success is not what I see.