I often feel that in education today we’re being told to teach small compartments of skills and knowledge without any serious consideration of the big picture. It’s almost like assuming that showing a child how nine or ten jigsaw pieces fit together will teach them how to do the whole jigsaw. Sometimes that approach works, sometimes it doesn’t.

NCLB strikes me as a one size fits all policy, and usually the people that kind of approach fits are the ones who would excel anyway because of their existing circumstances and quality of life.