That headline should have been plastered across America’s newspapers last week. If we still had newspapers.

Earlier this month, the National Conference of State Legislators – a bipartisan government watchdog organization – declared that the reform efforts of individual states in the wake of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) had been a miserable failure.

According to the Task Force’s Final Report, No Time to Lose: How to Build a World-Class Education System State by State, “After all of the national, state and district reform efforts during the decade following No Child Left Behind, the US was outperformed not only by a majority of the advanced industrial nations, but by a growing number of less-developed nations as well,” they wrote.

In other words: No Child Left Behind has left a LOT of children behind.

Clearly, this report will be a real wake up call to Washington that they need to take immediate and decisive action, right?

Both parties will surely come together to overhaul the American educational system to ensure that America stays ahead of the world in every academic field. Right?

For the good of the country. Right?

Wrong. Not only was the report completely ignored in the MSM, you had better believe there will be no changes or reforms whatsoever to this failed policy. We’ll probably never hear another peep about it.

Because that is America in a nutshell: continue with the same failed policies no matter what, against all logic and reason and human decency because somebody somewhere is making a whole shitload of money.

In fact, the ‘Mercan way is to actively ignore the problem and then lie about the problem and then pretend it isn’t even a problem until it’s far too late and all the money’s been siphoned off and it doesn’t matter anyway because there’s nothing you can do so you might as well get used to it…

Right?

No Child Left Behind was a cynical attempt to bury our poorly-paid teachers under a mountain of frivolous, busy-work testing regimes while simultaneously removing any rewards or enthusiasm from the students or the teachers.

And thank the gods for enriching all those private corporations tasked with – and charging the government handsomely for – handling, grading and evaluating those endless tests which public schools are now responsible for implementing.

Charter schools must also share the blame. Charters are simply cunningly designed mechanisms to steal money from public schools, with none of the accountability or protections for public school teachers. Well played, America!

Rather than facilitating educational solutions, NCLB created far more problems while exacerbated existing ones. Money which could have been spent upgrading schools, buying quality textbooks or hiring more teachers was diverted to private Industry to develop more and more tests because that was the sole focus of No Child Left Behind: TESTING.

While ensuring that every child in America would come to hate school as much as the Republicans, Americans have learned all about blame-shifting and sanctioning mediocrity with NCLB. Which, considering its provenance, makes perfect sense.

To the Neocons, No Child Left Behind has been an unqualified success.