I completely agree with the earlier comments about getting rid of the current system.
We live in what should be a great school district. It has the highest percentage of parents with doctorates (mostly MDs and PhDs in our case, but JDs also count in the census data) in the country. And precisely because they do see some very bright kids, they have very rigid rules for keeping them in line. To the point of prohibiting kids from checking above-grade-level books out of the library.
Parents with average kids seem happy. Many parents with above average kids are not, but are afraid to criticize anything less there be reprisals. There are some teachers that are worse than others, and you never see the most connected parents (i.e., school board members, PTA officers) end up with their kids in those classes.
The one merit of NCLB is that it is shutting down unionized schools and replacing them with either something better, at least on average. The problem is that the shutdown criteria don't adjust for inputs, and so are too easy for schools with good raw material, so for those of us in moderate-to-good neighborhoods, all we see is the wasteful effort that goes into gaming the tests. But NCLB, for all its flaws, is making a difference in inner cities.
It's a pity centrists gave up on vouchers. They would speed up reform dramatically. So would eliminating lotteries at charter schools. If markets were allowed to work, they could get us a lot closer to a solution.
