No Cletus Left Behind

Last night’s new episode of “The Simpsons” skewers the No Child Left Behind Act’s testing requirements — in only a few seconds. School district superintendent Chalmers, upon seeing a group of kids outside Springfield Elementary who are not enrolled in the school, asks principal Skinner why the kids aren’t enrolled. Skinner answers that allowing the kids — the children of local uneducated hillbilly Cletus — into the school would bring down its test scores, “and we would lose our federal funding.” (Education isn’t one of the issues on which CEI works, but pop culture illustrations of bad government policies’ unintended consequences are always welcome.)