Saturday, March 10, 2007  Marion Brady's Unanswered Letter to
the Aspen Fools  September 18, 2006  To members of the Aspen
Institute’s Commission on No Child Left Behind  My name is
Marion Brady, and I live in Cocoa, Florida. I’ve spent the last
seventy-four years in education as a student, high school
teacher, college professor, county-level administrator,
publisher consultant, writer of journal articles, textbooks,
professional books and newspaper columns, and visitor to
classrooms across America and abroad. You may or may not be
surprised to hear me say that No Child Left Behind is an
educational train wreck. I’m no defender of pre-NCLB public
education. When the legislation took shape, although the
education train was still on the track, it was barely moving.
What it had going for it was mostly potential. Thoughtful
educators were pointing out that General Systems Theory as it
had emerged from World War II, and research clarifying how the
brain organizes information, could, together, move student
intellec