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Lost too has been an appreciation of schools' broader mission. For American founders like Benjamin Rush and Thomas Jefferson, the primary function of schooling was to produce democratic citizens. In Rush's telling phrase, schools needed to mold "republican machines." Yet in a 2010 survey, 70% of high-school social-studies teachers reported that civics has been marginalized by the focus on reading and math assessments.

Of particular concern is the way "achievement-gap mania" has forced educators to quietly but systematically shortchange some students in the rush to serve others.

The effects of achievement-gap mania have been particularly severe in the area of advanced instruction and gifted education.

"We have focused on bringing up the bottom," he explains. "But we have failed to recognize that by ignoring the top, we are creating another problem. We are not sparking the creativity of those who have the most potential to make outstanding contributions."

And children who are ready for new intellectual challenges pay a price when they sit in classrooms focused on their less proficient peers.

And all parties agreed that school performance should be judged not by how well the schools did as a whole, but rather by achievement on reading and math assessments of the school's worst-performing demographic "subgroup." In other words, every public school in America would henceforth be judged primarily on its ability to drive up the reading and math scores of its most disadvantaged students.

Loveless found that students who comprised the bottom 10% of achievers saw visible progress in fourth-grade reading and math and eighth-grade math after 2000, but that the performance of students in the top decile barely moved. He concluded, "It would be a mistake to allow the narrowing of test score gaps, although an important accomplishment, to overshadow the languid performance trends of high-achieving students . . . .Gaps are narrowing because the gains of low-achieving students are outstripping those of high achievers by a factor of two or three to one."

Loveless's findings echo other research. A 1996 RAND Corporation study found that, when low-achieving students were placed in mixed-ability classrooms, they did about five percentage points better. High-achieving students, however, fared six percentage points worse in such classes — and middle-achieving students fared two percentage points worse than they did when placed in "tracked" classes.

The result? Fifty-six percent of the AP teachers surveyed said that too many students were in over their heads; 39% reported that the aptitude of AP students and their capacity to do the work had declined, while just 16% said it had improved. And the College Board, the organization that administers the AP program, reports that the share of AP exams receiving the minimum passing score of 3 or better declined by four percentage points between 2003 and 2008.

Mark Schneider, formerly the commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, has concluded that decades of efforts to boost the number of students taking rigorous math classes has caused a substantial dilution of those courses.

The Coleman Report concluded that parents' involvement in their children's lives had a vastly greater effect on achievement and eventual success than schooling did.

Coleman's findings were reinforced in the 1970s by sociologist Christopher Jencks and a team at Harvard, who conducted an extensive re-analysis of the data and concluded that the influence of schooling was "marginal.

A universal and exclusive focus on low-achieving kids ignores the fact that different education strategies work best for different kinds of students.

And yet five major consequences of NCLB, and of the achievement-gap mania it helped to spawn, demonstrate how this approach has ultimately been harmful to American education.

They are now expected to support efforts to close the achievement gap simply because it's "the right thing to do," regardless of the implications for their own children's education.

First, achievement-gap mania has signaled to the vast majority of American parents that school reform isn't about their kids.

Because middle-class parents and suburbanites have no personal stake in the gap-closing enterprise, reforms are tolerated rather than embraced.

Second, achievement-gap mania has created a dangerous complacency, giving suburban and middle-class Americans the false sense that things are just fine in their own schools.

Third, achievement-gap mania has prompted reformers to treat schools as instruments to be used in crafting desired social outcomes, capable of being "fixed" simply through legislative solutions and federal policies.

Fourth, the achievement-gap mindset stifles innovation. When a nation focuses all its energies on boosting the reading and math scores of the most vulnerable students, there is neither much cause nor much appetite for developing and pursuing education strategies capable of improving American schools overall.

Furthermore, the intense focus on gap-closing has led to a notion of "innovation" dedicated almost entirely to driving up math and reading scores and graduation rates for low-income and minority students.

Fifth, in a terrible irony, achievement-gap mania has indirectly made it more difficult for reformers to promote integrated schools.

It would be comforting if gap-closers even occasionally took seriously Rawls's warning that "it is not in general to the advantage of the less fortunate to propose policies which reduce the talents of others." Instead, they dismiss such concerns with moral indignation or specious claims that their preferred remedies entail no tradeoffs. In doing so, they duck the unpleasant reality that we cannot do everything: Doubling down on one area of education reform inevitably means easing up somewhere else.

The problem with achievement-gap mania is not that it is necessarily wrong; the problem is that its self-confident purveyors have been uniformly uninterested in the cost, complications, or consequences of their crusade. The result has been to effectively stifle debate, alienate most parents from the school-reform agenda, and insist that a flawed, mechanistic vision of schooling ought to steer our course in the 21st century.