There used to be a lot of school kids crowding the Surratt House Museum in Clinton, Maryland, a few miles south of Washington. Their teachers would haul them in by the busload--more than a thousand a year. The museum is housed in the homestead of one of the conspirators who was hanged for the murder of Abraham Lincoln. It's small, but it offers an unexpectedly comprehensive review of the Civil War, with a special emphasis on the assassination, and for years grade-school teachers in southern Maryland have used a field trip there as a convenient way to keep their students awake long enough to introduce them to an important episode in their nation's history.

In the last couple years, though, attendance has dried up--cut by more than half, according to Laurie Verge, the museum's director. Laurie is a former history teacher herself. From talks with old colleagues, she's pretty sure how to account for the undesired quiet that has fallen over her museum most weekdays: "The schools just don't have as much room for history or social studies in their curriculums any more," she says. "Ever since No Child Left Behind."

That would be the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, or NCLB as it has come to be known, the totem of national education reform and bipartisan bonhomie that for six years has stood as the signal domestic achievement of the Bush administration--and the exemplar of the Big Government Conservatism with which George W. Bush's reformers hoped to remake the way Republicans govern. Among many other things, the bill authorized the federal Department of Education to subject every student in every public school in the country to an elaborate regime of testing in reading and math. How well the students do on those tests determines how much money their schools and school districts receive from the federal government, and determines also, in remarkable detail, how the federal government will allow that money to be spent.

Reformers are busy people, tireless people, whose displeasure with the world as it is inspires them to improve the lives of their fellow human beings no matter what, and they get cranky when you bring up the law of unintended consequences. They dislike the implication that the benefits they confer in one field might lead to a shrinking of benefits in another. Yet the decline in attendance at Laurie Verge's wonderful little museum is, indeed, an unintended consequence of NCLB--just one of many, and a small one at that. Though no one thought of it in the long, sweaty hours while the bill was being written, or mentioned it in the self-congratulatory giddiness surrounding its final passage, NCLB's exclusive emphasis on reading and math has led a high percentage of schools (around 40 percent, according to one recent survey) to cut back on the teaching of history, civics, and government to the country's schoolchildren.

The irony here is hard to avoid: Republicans, who used to lament the rising tide of "historical illiteracy," have now reformed the nation's schools in such a way that can only swell the tide. But there are lots of ironies in Big Government Conservatism. Luckily for us, a handful of new books provides an opportunity to think about NCLB and its many consequences--and, by extension, to ask the question: So how's this Big Government Conservatism thing working out for us?

Michael Tanner, of the libertarian Cato Institute, devotes only a single chapter to NCLB in his manifesto against BGC (as he doesn't call it but I will, to save my fingers the typing). His critique of both the education reform and the philosophy it grew from is unrelenting, absolute, and refreshingly dyspeptic. With the authors of the other books here, liberal and conservative alike, he shares the near-universal diagnosis of the country's education troubles:

No one can deny the need to reform our education system. Our society is becoming increasingly divided between those with the skills and education needed to function in the increasingly competitive global economy and those without such skills and education . At the same time that education is becoming increasingly crucial, government schools are doing an increasingly poor job of educating children.

("Government schools," by the way, is Libertarian for "public schools.")