I think Dan Meyer's anti-anti-NCLB post reflects his experience as a young suburban(? "outside Santa Cruz?") high school math teacher. While there is ample debate over how to define the discipline of mathematics, how it should be taught and assessed, etc., the idea that one's Geometry students (for example) might be required to take a Geometry test written by the state at the end of the course is not that shocking. A teacher who had the basic raw materials: students with a reasonable amount of background knowledge, appropriate instructional materials, a curriculum aligned with the test, etc., but objected to being held accountable for his students' performance could look like a "whiner" in this case. My observation has been that math teachers are the least likely to complain about NCLB. It just fits the way their discipline is generally taught.
On the other hand, there are few NCLB tests that English teachers feel adequately sum up what a student should know and be able to do in the discipline of English. And teachers of other subjects are both unhappy with the de-emphasis of their disciplines and fearful of changes that would be caused by being included in its testing regimen.
So in Dan's experience as a math teacher, his practice is less affected by NCLB than it would be in other subjects, and he can be more sangine about its implications. Still, it is hard to reconcile his obvious pleasure in creating his own lessons and techniques with his dismissal of other teachers' unhappiness about their own loss of autonomy:
You guys complain that NCLB forces you to drill-and-kill your students, that it sucks the life out of learning, that you’ve had to abandon your best lessons, and that it stifles your creativity.
Does Dan think this can't happen to him, that his 500+ Keynote slides can't be swept away by the stroke of an administrative pen? The fact is, it probably won't happen to him, because again, high school teachers are relatively insulated from this phenomenon, compared to elementary teachers. But if it did happen, it wouldn't be because his methods had failed, but because of the scores of the school or district as a whole. His methods might have been succeeding, but they'd be swept away like those of his whiny, lazy, slacker colleagues.
Also, regarding The Wire, I haven't seen the fourth season yet, but I don't think Dan appreciates the extent to which the dehumanizing effect of simplistic quantitative analysis ("gotta get that clearance rate up!") is a persistent theme throughout that series. There is no way they'd be anything but anti-NCLB.