Another Reason the Educator Roundtable Will Fail

I thought that the Educator Roundtable's plea to dismantle NCLB was just naive, but Brett Pawlowski has an even better reason--they have no plan or alternative. That is another reason it will fail. Brett writes:

While I disagree with their reasoning and goals, their inevitable failure has nothing to do with either of those. We could argue back and forth, point/counterpoint, and it wouldn’t change the fact that they have no chance whatsoever of succeeding in their mission.

The reason has nothing to do with their message; it has everything to do with human nature. The simple fact is that, for people to achieve great things (however they define them), they have to move towards something, not away from something.

And that’s the problem with The Educator Roundtable’s fight to dismantle NCLB: they want to move away from something, but offer nothing to replace it.

snip

What they’re saying is that they have no plan at all – one can only assume that we’ll go back to the ways things were before NCLB and sit tight, awaiting further instructions. But assumptions aren’t visions, and state-level dialogues aren’t going to inspire anybody.

Our forefathers overthrew British rule, but it wasn’t simply because they didn’t like being oppressed; there have been, and always will be, plenty of oppressed people who put up with being ruled unfairly. What got them to act was the promise of something better: the vision of independent democratic self-rule. They almost certainly would not have revolted if they had not had a better option clearly in mind. They risked everything to move toward something, not just away from something.

Human nature tends to prevail on most items.