Whoosh! Ka-BOOM! The sound of a deadline colliding with reality.

As a writer, one of my favorite quotes about writing comes from Douglass Adams. He says: “I love deadlines. I especially like the whooshing sound they make as they go flying by.”

Too funny, right?

Well, it seems as if George Dubya Bush, once again, has a preposterous amount of egg on his face. Why? Because he set forth a ridiculous deadline that no one in the field of education (no one worth their salt, I should say) ever though would possibly be made and poof! now the Obama administration is left with cleaning up more of George Dubya Bush’s mess.

Seems that the “mandate” that all school children reach 100% academic proficiency by the year 2014 is gonna get yanked. (Read here for more.)

And why? Because this deadline was never anything more than a political platitude that Bush used to try and trump up goodwill for his political tenure anyway — crafted into policy at the expense of reality, of course. A reality, BTW, that he knew he’d never be on the hook for because his term in office would have long since been finished. (A few years too late on that front, if you ask me, but that’s fodder for another blog post.)

Yes, the aims of “closing the achievement gap” and “raising academic proficiency” are still going to stick around… but the deadline to do so is gonna be ka-boshed.

Still in Iraq, pulling the plug on NCLB’s proficiency deadline, financially reeling from deregulating the credit markets to the point of implosion while hunting for WMD’s that were trumped up to begin with… The guy makes Nixon look like Lincoln.

Whoosh! Ka-BOOM!

The sound of a deadline colliding with reality.