I’ve been meaning to note this for a while, but Education Week’s David Hoff is showing us how valuable it can be to unleash journalists to blog about the stuff they cover. There’s always more in the reporter’s notebook than you can squeeze into a published story, and Hoff has been treating us to lots of extra goodies and insight on the reauthorization of NCLB. And he even found a way to make it sound interesting!
His latest “cheat sheet” for the recently unveiled discussion draft on NCLB reauthorization had me wondering: After you differentiate between interventions between “priority schools” and “high priority schools,” whether it might be possible to negotiate something along the lines of a third set of “double secret priority schools,” where we intervene in ways that students/teachers/parents can’t even tell there are interventions actually in play. We could make NCLB so kind and gentle that it looks like the old days where Washington pumped loads of cash to schools and everyone was happy, whether kids could actually read or not.
That kind of seems to be the whole point of reauthorization right now – to make sure as much of the pain is hidden from anyone who actually has to feel it.