Dawn breaks over marblehead

Or, as they used to say in Hebrew, "finally the coin drops into the pay telephone." According to this AP story, Spellings is hinting that maybe "Adequate Yearly Progress" isn't really a measure of "progress," and that maybe all students achieving proficiency by 2012 isn't really the most realistic goal. I can hear the collective "DUH" that must have been running through the brains of the AFT gathering where she gave this talk -- people like Bella Rosenberg in the President's office have been saying this for a long, long time.

Another "DUH" moment in a great op-ed in today's New York Times. Normally I wouldn't find myself in such agreement with someone whose professional alliances include Checker Finn and Nina Rees, but he is right in this case. And he is saying what, again, people like Bella Rosenberg have been saying for a long, long time: it's the suburban schools that are going to be the downfall of NCLB.


Update: This article in the Atlanta Journal shows why keeping the disaggregation of scores is so, so important. The school in the article, Riverwood, is very similar to the high school I went to in suburban Atlanta. My school provided an excellent education -- to primarily white, upper-income, honors and magnet students. The article gives us a hint to why suburban parents could weaken NCLB to the point of irrelevance:

A school's reputation can affect property values and spur education-minded families to enroll their kids in private schools or move to other districts.