The philosophical mind-set shift that NCLB forced upon our country is not trivial and its importance should not be underestimated. Until NCLB, it was understood–not hypothesized, but understood–that students who are low-income, of color, or classified as special education students simply could not be expected to learn at the same levels as high-income white kids. NCLB said that it’s possible for our kids, of all income levels, races, ethnicities, or classifications, to achieve at a high level. This is a critical message to send to schools and to the general population.
Are young ed reformers just rebelling against their racist, classist, The Bell Curve reading parents? I don't know, but I also don't know where they got the oft-repeated idea that "Until NCLB, it was understood–not hypothesized, but understood–that students who are low-income, of color, or classified as special education students simply could not be expected to learn at the same levels as high-income white kids." Yes, you can find some grumpy teachers who believe this (particularly of "special education" students...), but when was this the basis of public policy?
And even if that is true, has eight years of NCLB disproved it? If I wanted to argue the opposite case I'd start with the fact that the 2009 Broad Prize winning district doesn't even meet NCLB's standards for "adequate yearly progress." The failure of NCLB to close the achievement gap at scale is a powerful argument against a "schools only" approach to equity.
The real situation is pretty obvious -- on the micro scale we can create some extraordinary schools that substantially mitigate other disadvantages, but at the macro level, we have failed to systematically undo broad, persistent, historically-grounded inequality at the national (or even city) scale via schools alone, and there is little reason to believe it is possible, at scale.
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