--In Chicago, the city must now offer 200,000 students the chance to move out of "failed" schools—but there are only 500 spaces in which to place them elsewhere.--

Now which hole did he pull that # out of?

If there's enough kids, the churches will find a way.

They always do.

Eve of the Destruction - the 60s boomers/progressives were all about destruction, now the shoe's on the other foot...

This conservative "hustle" has produced no significant school choice anywhere in America while dramatically increasing Federal spending tossed down the rathole of public schooling.

This guy probably could be convinced Prescott Bush killed JFK.

3+ years after NCLB: any voucher kids in Chicago? Houston? NYC? LA? Phoenix? Bay Area? Seattle? Boston? Denver? St. Louis? Minneapolis? Kansas City? Miami? Atlanta? Crawford?

NCLB was a hustle, but the Right was being hustled, not the Left.

The article is right: The best public schools fail NCLB because the sub-populations, for various reasons cannot make AYP. For example, our neighborhood elementary school, long considered of the best in the city, has failed NCLB AYP two years in a riw and is on a "warning" list because our "economically disadvantaged" students aren't cutting it.

Well, duh. Many of these students have parents who cannot provide academic support at home, and who have not provided genetic endownment in the past. That's why many of them are economicaly disadvantaged to begin with. How could they be expected to perform up to the standard of the mainstream population?

No sane person could expect that, but we are talking about public school teachers here. Remember, they have been telling the world for the last 30-odd years that all we have to do is keep shovelling money at them and human differences will be erased, and all the elephants in the living room will disappear.

The left, and this has included the public education establishment, has made the same error the Germans made in WWII: they have assumed that their opponents were inferior, stupid, subhumans. They are about to pay the same price.

Palmcroft:

Indeed, there are:

http://www.brothersjudd.com/blog/archives/014194.html

70,000 kids NATIONWIDE; this is an embarrassment and points to the shame of NCLB and the complete victory of one Ted Kennedy in this matter

there are 30 times more millionaires in this country than there are kids with school choice;
there are more Amish kids in this country than kids with school choice;
there are 100 times more teachers in this country than kids with school choice!

so, OJ, get over it, NCLB is a joke

Palmcroft: Point is, how many were there before NCLB? How many 1 year later? 2 years? If it is growing exponentially, than your point will be moot in a few years.

I am not really very interested in what Perlstein think of education in Minnesota. If he thinks it's actually good, he should move here and put his children in a Minneapolis public school, not an all-white school on the South Dakota border. There are a couple of good schools here in town--hope he can get his child in one.

But they're mostly terrible. I think the public school teachers here very often try hard. It isn't enough, not nearly acceptable. My niece's great-uncle, a well-known figure in the Hmong community, a consultant to the St Paul public schools and a professor at the University, specifically called to ask me to send her to private school. But hey Mr Perlstein--what would he know? Move your family to Camden or Bloomington Avenue and prove him wrong!

While the inner city schools in MN are admittedly poor, the rest of the schools are quite good. MN has had school choice for years prior to NCLB. Since 1991 you can enroll your child in any district you want, provided the district has room and you pay for the transportation.

Some districts like Mounds View have a 3+ year waiting list.

Gideon--

I didn't just look at Minneapolis and St Paul by the way. The schools in the first-ring suburbs aren't much either, and neither is Eden Prairie. Acceptable maybe, but not great.

Yeah, the Bushies plan while the Lefties protest. Oddly, I doubt this will convince the Left of anything other than "we need to protest more, to get our message out".

Of couse NCLB puts public schools in a box they can't get out of. If you want to do a hostile political takeover of an industry (and that's all primary education is, it's a service industry), then you start by setting it a goal in the public mind that you know it can never meet. Unsafe at Any Speed, anyone? Progressives have been doing this to regular industry for the better part of a century now, and it works. Why is Perlstein surprised to find himself staring at the business end of his own weapon?

Joe: very insightful, it's a very interesting comparison you make; I hope school failures end up creating real choices for the kids, not just other public school choices, e.g., charter schools, but real non-public school choices; so far, it simply has not happened