…Thadeus Russell, writing in New York, who says:
Interestingly, though several liberal Democrats initially supported No Child Left Behind, and Obama has said he would continue it with more funding, its philosophical basis was laid by neoconservatives, beginning in 1972 when Norman Podhoretz published an article inCommentary promoting “The Idea of a Common Culture.” Neocons irritated by multiculturalism and what they saw as a slippage of “standards” argued insistently that the very idea of “one America” could only be saved by public education’s training children uniformly for “entry into the common culture.” By the time of W’s candidacy, right-wing policy machers like William Bennett and think-tanks like the Hudson Institute had made Podhoretz’s idea a major plank in the GOP’s educational platform, on which No Child Left Behind was built.
Not really even sure what say about this, other than to make the obvious point that NCLB was built on the previous version of ESEA, enacted in 1994 under President Clinton, that there’s a world of difference between the reading and math skills that NCLB actually tests and the “common culture” debates to which Russell refers, that “several liberal Democrats” understates initial support for NCLB by several orders of magnitude, and that the whole paragraph sounds like a bad parody of deranged left-wing conspiracy mongering. You can do better, New York!
Lowering Student Loan Default Rates: What One Consortium of Historically Black Institutions Did to Succeed 
College and Career-Ready: Using Outcomes Data to Hold High Schools Accountable for Student Success
03/11/10 | Kevin Carey is quoted on the rising costs of education in The Economist.
03/10/10 | Chad Aldeman's False Fronts paper is quoted on Accuracy in Academia.
03/09/10 | Ben Miller is quoted on Federal Family Education Loan defaults on The Huffington Post.
03/09/10 | Ben Miller is quoted on loan origination on the Firedog Lake blog.
03/07/10 | Kevin Carey calls for a Race to the Top in higher education in a column in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
My only guess is that Mr. Russell misread a passage in Don Hirsch’s new book, which mentions the Podhoretz essay, and it got tangled up in Russell’s mind with … oh, I don’t know.