Suburban Complaints About NCLB

Hearing "twentysomething expert"Alexandra Robbins talk trash about No Child Left Behind last night on The Colbert Report was particularly annoying not just because her complaints were tired and predictable but also because Robbins' new book (The Overachievers) isn't about what's happening at low-income, under-resourced schools that are the focus of NCLB but rather about relatively well-off and wildly overachieving kids at Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, Maryland.

According to SchoolMatters, Whitman is meeting AYP in every category, often by wide margins. It's hard to imagine that NCLB is anything more than a teachers lounge scapegoat at a school like that. Whatever excruciating pressures and testing that are going on for those kids, you can't really blame on NCLB. And clearly it's not just testing companies and tutoring providers who are out to make a buck off of the law.