Back in the day, it seemed like the Children’s Defense Fund was the advocacy organization when it came to kids. They didn’t focus just on school reform, but they had a small education shop and were pretty much everywhere on this set of issues. You hardly hear anything about them starting in the early 1990s. They’d gotten so weak on school issues at least by 2001 that the Bush administration was able to steal the motto, “No child left behind,” that CDF had apparently coined. I don’t know why I care -- I’m sure we’d disagree on NCLB, and/or they’d be as ineffective as most groups in DC (ie, pretty much entirely). But they, unlike the Trust or CCCR, had a big, Sierra Club-size membership. Or so it seemed.