This story ran on Monday in the Trib, and has a good explanation of one of the fundamental problems with NCLB. Here's the good part:

No Child Left Behind requires schools to test students annually in math and reading in 3rd through 8th grade and once in high school. By law, the entire school as well as specific subgroups of children--based on race, income and special education status--must meet standards on state exams. If even one subgroup fails to measure up, the school is tagged as troubled. The achievement targets inch up every year, until 2014, when 100 percent of children are expected to pass the exams. [....]

By law, schools that fail to meet state goals two years in a row are tagged as "needs improvement" and must allow students to transfer to better campuses and pay for their transportation. The federal sanctions apply only to schools that accept federal poverty money.

In Illinois, a school lands on the "needs improvement" list if the school or a subgroup fails to meet state standards two years in a row in reading, or two years in a row in math. If, for example, a school's white students fail to measure up in reading one year and the Asian-American students fail reading the next year, the school goes on the list.

This is as well written an explanation of the core problems with NCLB as I have read. To clarify, in the United States of America, by 2014 if one of your sub groups, or 40 students, do not "meet or exceed" expectations on the reading or math test the entire school will be shut down. Right now a school with, say, 40 special ed. (LD, BD, etc.) students who fail to adequately read at their grade level must pay the transportation costs for other students to go to an alternative school.

One might be tempted to believe that this is designed to help schools "leave no child behind," but these ridiculous expectations just serve as a way to funnel monies out of the public schools and into the private schools.

Meanwhile we wait for the conservatives to build a movement to overturn this legislation. We liberals can't do it - we are elitists who are fighting for our union, apparently. It's up to the conservatives.

Anyone out there?