Nothing to See Here

Bill Richardson has a remarkably useless op-ed in USA Today today, calling for the abolishment of No Child Left Behind. Why does he want to "scrap it"? I have no idea. The piece is just a series of unsupported cliches and selective statistics that could be rearranged in random order to no discernible effect. If Richardson has better ideas about how to improve education, it apparently didn't occur to him to implement them in New Mexico, which has some of the lowest NAEP scores in the country for low-income and Latino students. That the op-ed concludes by Richardson essentially saying "I'll do whatever the NEA wants me to do" at the same time that he's running at 2 percent percent in the latest Washington Post / ABC News presidential primary polls is, I'm sure, just a coincidence.