Even the mere collection of demographic data mandated by NCLB is vaulable. In my recent study of Florida vouchers, I used NCLB data for demographic variables, because it was the only up-to-date source of data on the number of LEP students in each school.

I’m not against testing and transparency. Far from it. It is crystal clear however that the federal government can not do anything to stop states from dummying down, but have in fact provided a huge incentive to lower standards.

But it’s not clear to what extent the dumbing down is attributable to NCLB. I talked to an old hand in Indiana testing politics, and he gave me the full twenty-year story of how standards are constantly being set and dumbed down, set and dumbed down.

And any dumbing down has to be weighed against the rise in standards elsewhere. I would say the most important rise in standards is the simple imposition of transparency. Before NCLB, many states engaged in no statewide standardized testing, or did not make the results available in a useful format. Every one of those states has to be counted as having increased, not decreased, the rigor of its school accountability, because the mere presence of a quantitative standard creates transparency about results. And I’m sure some states that already did testing are doing it better now. Plus, consider that we’re about to get our first national standard for reporting graduation rates, under the auspices of NCLB.

As for backloading, isn’t that one of the key ways useful things get done in Washington? You do what you really want to do now, and to get people on board and/or sell the policy to the press, you make impossible promises whose fulfilment is backloaded to Never-Never Land. In this case, the imposition of transparency is the real policy, and the promise that all students will become proficient is the bait. I expect that when the time comes, the AMO objectives will be quitely kicked down the road another decade.

Suppose we never get those magical AMO gains. How is that an argument against NCLB? The real story of NCLB is that the public schools got a big cash payoff in exchange for submitting to quantitative measurement of their results, allowing all sorts of research to be done on school performance that couldn’t be done before, leading directly to public accountability for results through simple transparency, even if the formal sanctions associated with NCLB never bite. It seems like a good deal to me.

In other words, the worst is yet to come.

Jay seems willing to fix this flaw, but the administration and Congress do not. To date, none of the major reauthorization proposals have even admitted that this problem exists.

Yes, NCLB has various flaws, but so do most practical alternatives. Rather than going “anywhere but here,” it is most likely and probably wisest for us to muddle through, fixing someobvious flaws while accepting other defects.