Chapter 6: Our “Excellent Adventures” With Ncate: Stories of Struggle, Resistance, and Hope

This chapter builds on and updates an article we wrote almost ten years ago (Novinger & O’Brien, 2003) detailing our concerns about the largely irrelevant, fragmented, and meaningless curriculum many children were experiencing in the name of school “reform” and meeting state and national standards. In fact, we suggested that the focus on standards and regulation has moved beyond being “just” boring and meaningless to being deliberately destructive. Boring, meaningless shit (O’Brien, 2001) keeps all of us in education—children, classroom teachers, and college professors—too busy to engage in meaningful critiques of the status quo, and that is bad enough. But the recent heightened and overt emphasis on control and compliance is harmful in that it is about the dismantling of the very idea, never mind the practice, of education for democracy.