What's interesting to me is how some have let the vague phrasing there determine their response to this.
Look at this quote from the article: ""Only two subjects? What a sadness," said Thomas Sobol, an education professor at Columbia Teachers College and a former New York State education commissioner. "That's like a violin student who's only permitted to play scales, nothing else, day after day, scales, scales, scales. They'd lose their zest for music."
What BS. Math teaches one's mind how to think logically; reading teaches one how to retrieve and process information.
I find it funny that people are tsk-tsking the reduction of history in this thread, where on any other thread we'd be--properly--talking about how history is the subject where the majority of prosletyzing for liberal ideas happens. I work in a school--I see this first hand. I hear the discussions about the war being only for oil, the conspiracy theories about Bush, etc.--all of it directly from the history classes.
There is only so much time in a school day. This article focuses mostly on how one school has ham-handedly fumbled when faced with the NCLB requirements. Instead of coming up with creative responses, they've done the petulant liberal act and said "Fine, we'll just CUT HISTORY!"
In my personal experience I've seen that cutting class time leads to less spinning and more focus on facts, dates, etc. If a kid knows how to read, he can educate himself on ANY topic--the only one where that doesn't help so much is math.
Focusing on reading and math is probably the single most significant education establishment GAIN since Bush came into office. As someone who works in a school (not as a teacher), I can only applaud this. I can also read for context, and one tossed-off comment in an article merely obfuscates what can only be seen as a good thing.
If ALL our kids got out of school was a diploma that meant they could read at the very best of their abolity, then their K-12 education would be worth it. That's not the case, and this article attempts to turn a silk purse into a sow's ear. What's interesting is how readily some FReepers accept the New York Times' word on this.