Well, we may be arguing the same thing in different ways, as I agree with your first paragraph.
The way the story goes is that the mother of a young girl, whenever she made roast, would cut off the end and place it on the side of the roast. Her daughter, being an inquisitive child, asked her why she did this. After thinking about it, she said something along the lines of "I don't really know—I think it improves the flavor or something. Your grandmother always did it." So, since she didn't know, she decided to ask her mother. When she asked her mother, her mother said she always did it because her mother did it. So, the young mother went to her grandmother, who happened to still be living at this time, and asked her. Her grandmother then replied that she did it because the roast would not have fit into the pot otherwise!
I agree that NCLB had lots of problems. But I think that often we emphasize things which we, in our own fields or mentalities, judge to be important, which really aren't so. Many things taught in the sciences and maths are of this nature—I have not used the vast majority of the math I learned in high school (I was an advanced math student) since, and this includes taking the GRE (to get into grad school)! If I was less inquisitive, I'd have used less of the science, but the fact is that there's a lot of the sciences I've never used, either. However, I use the French I learned in High School all the time. I use the Welsh (an obscure language!) I learned in college WAY more often than I'm faced with the possibility of multiplying matrices or burning things to figure out how many calories they contain. And, obviously, I use my experiences in Creative Writing all the time, as well.
The fact of the matter that any given bit of knowledge is only going to end up being useful to a limited portion of the population later on in life. While I definitely think a basic knowledge of Math (say to the level of Algebra), History and Government, English (for literacy's sake), and Science (esp. understanding the Scientific Method) are critical to education, there's currently a lot of mandatory "fluff" in our education system which is biased towards traditional education. Can our society not have artists as well as mathematicians? (For what it's worth, a friend of mine who is currently getting his PhD in Math [specializing in Topology] tells me that art is, generally, more useful in life than advanced math.)