Let me give one example of how the assassination of college education began in the '70s. At ISU there had always been a very liberal policy on retaking courses and dropping them. If a student retook a course, his/her grade the second time (or 3e or 4th) around was THE grade and replaced all the arlier ones. Also, students could drop a course repeatedly. This did give students from the inner city or from some of the shitty rural districts a way to "make up" for earlier lacks just by retaking a course several times. Take College algebra three times, and by th second time around you have (finally) learned high-school algebra and can get thrugh the third time. I think this was especially important with freshman comp (that ught not to be a requirement anyhow).
But in the '70s (under the banner of "standards") this was changed and when a student retook a course, the two grades were averaged. This made it extremely difficult to recover from a disastrous freshman year. Also students now can only drop a course once. The second time, they are trapped.
I suspect this can be taken as a microcosm of the direction that has been pursued all over for several decades. Then No Child Left Behind merely represents an extension of this process to the public schools.
And a note on Freire. The attempt to use him in public education by a scattering of people was of course absurd. His methods and goals only make sense in the kind of context I saw vividly dramatized in several documentaries, each dealing with a given liberation struggle in some ccountry. I remember particularly one from El Salvador, a priest teaching an adult literacy class: it was interrupted by the sound of helicopters and the class had to run for cover. In that context and only that context does Freire make sense. Don't blame him for his use by u.s. educators.
Carrol