Here's Andy Rotherham's equally spot-on take:

The legislation under consideration in the Senate pretty much scraps efforts to close achievement gaps at all schools and focuses mostly on the bottom 5% of schools.

In a classic case of strange bedfellows, the education establishment and Congressional conservatives can all agree — albeit for different reasons — that these federal rules should go. Teachers' unions and other special-interest education groups dislike the heavy pressure for school improvement from Washington. (And conservatives just dislike Washington.) This accounts for the sudden enthusiasm for states' rights among Democrats, who generally favor an activist federal role in public policy. It's also one reason Washington insiders think the Senate plan could get a favorable reception in the more conservative House.

Now comes the hard truth. No matter how many people try to argue that focusing on closing achievement gaps is a bad idea, it's not. It's still the right goal. And not merely for social reasons — although the crushed dreams, diminished opportunities, and the violence that today's educational system does to communities and any semblance of equality should not be underestimated. Closing the gap is the right goal for economic reasons, too. The consulting firm McKinsey & Company estimates that closing the racial and ethnic achievement gaps would increase national gross domestic product by hundreds of billions of dollars, or 2% to 4% of our overall GDP. The cost of not addressing these gaps will obviously rise as America's Hispanic population grows.

The good, or at least not bad, news is that when it comes to focusing on the least advantaged students, the federal government has done alright over the years. For every fiasco — think busing — there are compelling counterexamples such as desegregation, special education and equal resources for girls under Title IX. And while today's outcomes for racial and ethnic minorities as well as low-income students are unacceptable, the nation has made progress both before and after NCLB took effect.

So don't be fooled by claims that gap closers don't care about high-achieving students or assume these kids can just take care of themselves. Gap-closing proponents also favor gifted-education and similar programs, in part because poor and minority students are shortchanged on the high end as well. At some level, of course, there are tradeoffs — a dollar can't be spent in two places. But gap closers' main argument is that the enormous benefits of creating a more equitable society outweigh smaller costs of getting us there.

In no small way, it's the same argument we're having about taxes, Wall Street and the American social contract more generally. Unfortunately for minorities and poor kids in America's public schools, no one is occupying parks or packing town hall meetings to demand much of anything for these children. Instead, at the one level of government that has looked out for them over the years — the federal level — policymakers are simply walking away.

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