It is fascinating to me that the impulse to more and more rigidly focus on a single, narrow vein of knowledge has such enormous traction. As you say, it doesn’t seem that NCLB is particularly helping testing outcomes. I believe I read that less art, music and PE hurt rather than help outcomes in ‘core’ subjects. And, again iirc, studies shown no or inverse correlations between amount of homework and results. On a different front, the money spent in schools is famously uncorrelated to outcomes. Yet we as a society continue to follow the strategy: ‘push on the string’ expecting different results.

Separately, after reading Chapter 4 of our text, I can’t help thinking that teachers are standing beneath an enormous social avalanche. It would seem the learning issues caused by the factors at work in low SES in our society are far beyond the capability of the educational system to ameliorate.

It makes one wonder when folks will stand up and yell “Stop!” but that doesn’t seem to be happening…