Every once in a while, I really like the Fordham Foundation's Gadfly, especially when it offers up  provocative commentary and analysis of education policy. (Other times -- well, if you don't have anything good to say about someone....)

Here are a couple gadfly goodies from this week's edition:

At its heart, today's NCLB amounts to a civil rights manifesto dressed up as an accountability system. This provides an untenable basis for serious reform, as if Congress declared that every last molecule of water or air pollution would vanish by 2014, or that all American cities would be crime-free by that date.

There is evidence from states such as Florida and California that the act is causing them to restructure reasonably good schools, to confound their own pre-existing (and sometimes superior) accountability regimens, and to fracture coherent school improvement strategies. NCLB is also pushing states to move aggressively in too many schools at once, ensuring that capacity won't be up to the challenges at hand.

And this:

We have spent forty years since the LBJ era learning how hard school reform actually is. Yet too many otherwise serious people, such as the members of the Aspen-based NCLB Commission, sustain that pretense, indeed worsen it by suggesting that sixty-plus technocratic changes and considerably more federal control will cure what ails the law.