When the Obama administration screws up public education even more dramatically - a virtual guarantee given that the Education Secretary is an abysmally poor education administrator and the Department itself is miscalculating budgetary needs by billions of dollars - it will be useful to have this handy:

Today must have been an especially busy news day because so far there is surprisingly little interest in a new CEP analysis showing some good news for the No Child Left Behind policy... Is it too cynical to think it would be bigger news if it went the other way? And hard to make the case that CEP is in the tank for the last administration, in fact the opposite case has been made...

This is the only good justification I've heard for the policy - implemented broadly across Los Angeles and New York - of paying teachers not to teach. Apparently the people who've been in charge of education for the last few decades have not been entirely on the ball, and needed NCLB's performance-measuring push.

Which is weird, because I would think that an educational culture steeped in self-esteem idiocy would actually boost test scores.

References and previously after the jump...