What happens when you devote your energies to minimum standards rather than striving towards excellence?

You end up with an Interstate highway system riddled with potholes and bridges that collapse, not an Autobahn.

Sam Dillon reports in today's New York Times on the dramatic change of heart that former Bush official Diane Ravitch has undergone in the wake of the mediocrity (an understatement if ever there was one) that the educational policies she once advocated have helped to produce. No Student Left Behind, charter schools, and many other right-wing notions have proven no more effective than blind indifference in changing the results of the educational success in the U. S.

Ravitch has not only changed her mind about the Bush agenda on education, but she's gone so far as to resign from a number of the conservative organizations that helped promote them.