I was part of a conversation about No Child Left Behind the other day. Like most people, I have plenty of negative things to say about NCLB, but because the event took place in our School of Education where most students will never have heard a good word about NCLB, and because, frankly, I hear a lot of criticism of NCLB which is completely off the rails, I thought I’d say something positive about it. For excellent criticisms of NCLB see Richard Rothstein. For my muted two cheers (the text of the talk I gave) see below the fold. I’ll follow up in a couple of days with an explanation of why one of my students was completely unfairly impressed with my powers of foresight.