You may recall the controversy around an earlier work of Charles Murray: “The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life” published in 1994 in which he and his co-author, Richard Hernstein, attempted to make the case that IQ (Intelligence Quotient) trumps social class as a predictor of academic achievement. They explored the possibility of group differences in IQ and this was the third rail for many.

As a scion of the right wing, Murray has never shied away from controversial views and in recent years he has turned his attention to NCLB. I cringe at the thought that I find areas of agreement with someone like Murray, but that is the “strange bedfellow” nature of the widespread and ideological diverse opposition to the the law that has emerged particularly in the last two years.

In 2006, Murray wrote an op-ed piece for the Wall Street Journal, “Acid Tests”, in which he said that, “Test scores are the last refuge of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). They have to be, because so little else about the act is attractive.” The point of his article is the lack of meaning in using pass percentages as a measurement of progress particularly when the central focus is closing the achievement gaps between groups. As a parent of children in the Frederick County, MD schools he points out that “schools our children have attended have turned themselves inside out to try to produce the right test results, with dismaying effects on the content of classroom instruction and devastating effects on teacher morale.”

Just this week, in an article published in The New Criterion, “The Age of Educational Romanticism”, Murray offers his analysis of how we got to the current policy debacle.  In thrusting his lance at the central premise of NCLB - “On requiring every child to be above average.” - he hopes that its absurdity will bring to an end an era of romanticism characterized by a belief tha schools can improve the performance of every child no matter what their ability.

He believes that the central problem with our educational system is that it “… cannot make itself talk about the implications of diverse educational limits.” He says that we ‘romanticists’  ask “… too much from students at the bottom of the intellectual pile, ask[s} the wrong things from those in the middle, and ask[s] too little from those at the top.”

What do you think?