Report Card Nation

"In the winter of 2003, a presidential mandate thrust a dozen dedicated public servants onto the national stage. Charles Smith, former UT chancellor and Tennessee's former Education Commissioner, was one of them. The task was to take the Nation's Report Card, a relatively obscure but highly respected national assessment, to the forefront of George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind initiative, amid a renewed scrutiny of public education and a controversial reliance on standardized testing. Smith takes readers behind the scenes of the 2003 assessment that would pave the way for public school successes and budgetary windfalls but also resulted in inner-city school failures and closures, a rise in private school enrollment and the public funding of private schools, and, later, the implementation of the ill-fated Common Core"--