A ‘Surge’ Strategy for No Child Left Behind?

By John Merrow

Stay the course? Surge? Or rethink the mission? Those familiar questions are being asked again, but not about Iraq. This time around, they are domestic -policy questions, because President Bush’s signature education legislation, the No Child Left Behind Act, comes up for reauthorization in 2007.

But the parallel with Iraq is oddly appropriate. The No Child Left Behind Act has created an upheaval in American public education. It’s had myriad consequences, positive, negative, and unintended. Its critics say that the 5-year-old law is replacing a bad system with one that’s equally oppressive, the tyranny of multiple-choice testing and a narrow curriculum.

No Child Left Behind even has its own version of the Iraq Study Group that former Secretary of State James A. Baker III and former Rep. Lee Hamilton chaired. This national group, the Commission on No Child Left Behind, has as its chairs two former governors, Roy E. Barnes of Georgia and Tommy...