Furthermore

Expanding a little more on yesterday's post about "Bigger, Bolder," which presented a lot of good ideas, both educational and non-educational, as an alternative to the current accountability regime, but never quite got around to saying what we should do with the current regime.

Why didn't they? There are plenty of alternatives to having the federal government impose a regulatory accountability scheme on states and school districts. One could say, "Uncle Sam should get out of the accountability business altogether and simply provide enough Title I money to compensate for the negative effects of poverty while leaving it to local school boards and perhaps states to ensure quality; existing governance structures are there for a reason and the nation has managed to prosper under their leadership for quite some time."

Or, one could strike a more moderate pose and say "NCLB is unrealistic and inflexible; we should back off of both the 100% proficiency goal and the 2014 deadline and switch to a system whereby schools are expected to make incremental improvement toward a goal that would be less than 100%, the amount less varying by school based on student demographics and other external factors that influence achievement and are out of educators' control. Districts should also be allowed to opt out of strictly test-based accountability measures and instead present alternative, locally-developed assessments of student achievement in both core subjects and other vital skills like leadership and critical thinking. If achievement as measured by local assessments is good enough, then districts with low standardized test scores shouldn't be identified for improvement or other other regulatory interventions."

I don't agree with either of these policies, but I'm guessing lots of other people do. You could easily imagine a large, well-funded coalition of groups rallying behind them. You could also imagine writing them down and asking a group of well-respected education experts to sign them.
And yet in all the hue and cry about NCLB, all the denunciations and appeals and calls to action, very few people or organizations have been willing to actually put pen to paper and say precisely what policymakers should do. Goals and principles don't count; these are often deliberately vague or amount to artfully-worded statements that the world would be a better place if unavoidable tradeoffs and tough decisions could be avoided. The NEA's NCLB agenda, for example, including items like "Accountability should be based upon multiple measures of student learning and school success," a goal that sounds reasonable and could easily accomodate both policies to strengthen accountability and to destroy it entirely.

So what's stopping people? Perhaps it's not as easy as it seems?