This weekend's Washington Post reported the stunning news that some young people don't know much about the life of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. -- and one of the causes of this ignorance is NCLB. This is wrong in so many ways -- the information is based on a survey that finds most students are knowledgeable about MLK, the survey tests college students whose K-12 education came mostly pre-NCLB -- that it's hard to know where to start. But here's a quick response, paraphrasing one of the nation's leading education policy analysts, Shawn Corey Carter (also known as Jay-Z): NCLB has 99 problems but this ain't one.

The article bends over backwards to employ one of the media's favorite education themes: Young people are stupid.  The article reports that "more than 81 percent [of surveyed college students] knew that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was expressing hope for 'racial justice and brotherhood' in his historic 'I Have a Dream' speech."  Should that figure be higher?  Yes.  Will most media reports focus on the silly answers from those who were guessing or deliberately answering incorrectly?  Yes. 

Another favorite theme is that every education story has an NCLB connection.  True in some sense, but this article's mandatory NCLB link is a stretch:

"In many schools across the country, teachers say social studies has taken a back seat under the federal No Child Left Behind law, which stresses math and reading. Squeezing history into the curriculum can be difficult, educators say, and taking time out of a scheduled lesson to use a federal holiday -- even King's -- as a teaching moment can be tough."

That paragraph is followed by a quote not from a teacher but from a student.  And where's the pre-NCLB data about young people's knowledge of MLK?  How much school time is spent on MLK?

As this blog has discussed many times, NCLB really is leading some schools to give less time to subjects other than math and reading.  But this simplistic handling of a serious issue just makes it easier for the "NCLB just needs a tweak" crowd to ridicule the media and dismiss NCLB's real problems.