An Astonishing Look At No Child Left Behind

Here's Jay Mathews' review of a new book on NCLB, which I just ordered and am looking forward to reading:

The arguments about No Child Left Behind surround me. Some  days I imagine I am hearing them come through the walls. I  work in the Post bureau in Alexandria, Va., a riverside city that houses many of the national organizations that focus on public schools. When I visit the main Post newsroom to prove to my editors I am still ambulatory, I am smack in the middle of another concentration of educational organizations in downtown D.C.

Everybody in those buildings is talking, talking, talking  NCLB. But these conversations are about politics and testing procedures and assessment standards and state's rights and a lot of other stuff that bores  me. Where are the teachers? Where are the kids?

I just found them. They are in a new book by my former Post colleague Linda Perlstein, who has done what  all we other education reporters wish we had the time and talent to do. She has spent a year in an elementary school full of disadvantaged children and recorded with astonishingly clarity and insight just what No Child Left Behind is doing to and for those kids and  their teachers, with none of the highs or lows, triumphs or failures, smart moves or idiotic pratfalls left out.

This is the best book ever written about No Child Left Behind.  It may hold on to that title in perpetuity because we  will soon have a new president and, I suspect, a new federal education program. That program may even give itself a new name, since the old name is crusted over with slimy stuff people have been throwing at it.

The book's title is "Tested: One  American School Struggles to Make the Grade." You can get it for $16.50 on amazon.com. Perlstein uses her remarkable writing skills, shown to great advantage in her last book, "Not  Much Just Chillin':  The Hidden Lives of Middle Schoolers," to take us inside Tyler Heights  Elementary School in Annapolis, Md., an Anne Arundel County school where more than 70 percent of the students qualify for federal lunch subsidies.

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An Astonishing Look At No Child Left Behind  
By Jay Mathews
Washington Post Staff  Writer
Tuesday, July 31, 2007; 12:10 PM

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/31/AR2007073100784.html

The arguments about No Child Left Behind surround me. Some days I imagine I am hearing them come through the walls. I work in the Post bureau in Alexandria, Va., a riverside city that houses many of the national organizations that focus on public schools. When I visit the main Post newsroom to prove to my editors I am still ambulatory, I am smack in the middle of another concentration of educational organizations in downtown  D.C.