The Nebraska Model

TIME just published an interesting article about Nebraska's answer to No Child Left Behind.

They've bucked the trend of kow-towing to federal No Child Left Behind mandates for standardized, and many would say inferior, testing in favor of a more flexible, comprehensive, and bottom-up approach. That bottom-up part is the crux of the matter - I continually see systems designed top-down that are forced by their own need for uniformity into inflexibility that fosters resistance from users. In spite of the fact that organizations see and agree with the writing on the wall regarding information and communication technologies and networks, they betray their fundamental misunderstanding of them by using them only as larger and faster tools for gathering data or disseminating information using the same clunky hierarchical model.

Nebraska is essentially acting like any of the successful user-driven networks out there (flickr, deli.cio.us, Mozilla, etc.), communicating expectations, but then sitting back and letting good processes driven by smaller networks (in this cases school districts) percolate to the top. Add their QA methods which are both internally-reinforcing and externally-audited, and it sounds like it's a system that greatly outshines the lumbering NCLB it replaced.