What happens when you tell the principals of inner-city high schools that they'll be fired if their students don't improve?

Answer: Funny things start happening to the students and the tracking systems.

In my earlier writing on this subject, I focused mainly on the fact that the goals of No Child Left Behind are basically unattainable, and that in trying to meet the goals, other areas will get forgotten.

Maybe because I'm basically a believer in the goodness of humanity, I ignored the likelihood that school administrations would manipulate their test scores one way or another. Silly me. The really scary thing is that the guy who devised the system in Houston (Rod Paige) was appointed Secretary of Education. We can presume that he's the brains behind NCLB.

Paige, I'm certain, is simply naive. He probably has a hard time believing (as I do) that someone who spends his life educating our youth would intentionally prevent kids from taking a required course, in order to force them to stay in 9th grade and therefore not take the 10th grade achievement exam. But apparently that happens. People get funny when they're scared.

NCLB, like zero-tolerance policies and the "Three Strikes" laws, is a simplistic answer to an extremely complicated problem. Solving the problem is far harder than just giving people the right incentives, and I don't have the answers either. But I do know that this isn't the answer.

Postscript: When I lived in Illinois, She Who Puts Up With Me got into a minor car accident when she rear-ended a Pepsi truck on the way to a job interview (she got the job anyway). It turns out that, in Illinois, there's a moving violation called "Failure to Avoid an Inter-Vehicle Collision" or somesuch. In other words, the simple act of getting into a car accident was illegal. Therefore, only lawbreakers get into car accidents. So, if we can just find all the lawbreakers and keep them off the roads, there will be no more car accidents in Illinois.