There’s definitely a “Seeing Like A State” point on legibility here. NCLB tries to make the performance of disparate state/county education systems more legible

There’s definitely a “Seeing Like A State” point on legibility here. NCLB tries to make the performance of disparate state/county education systems more legible to the federal government, so that it can apply carrots and sticks to “improve” (for some definition of the word) performance. By simplifying the problem to performance at this curriculum, you gain the ability to measure, but also corrupt the thing you are trying to measure, by forcing schools to teach to the test instead of teaching better (where there are direct tradeoffs between the two). I think NCLB fails to recognize that education is something which benefits from local expertise, which means you need to fund teachers/schools and get out of the way, rather than try to standardize it. I recognize this is very hard politically.