No Child Left Behind

I thought this was some interesting commentary over on Centrist Conspiracy:

No Child Left Behind Act not so dim

Because Bush’s team has been less than effective in communicating to the American public exactly what No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is and how it works, I had bought into the Democratic propaganda claiming that NCLB consisted of unfunded mandates and that it unfairly penalized poorly performing schools. I had only a vague notion regarding the purposes of NCLB, and an even murkier notion regarding its actual content. It turns out that NCLB is a system of national testing of schools to hold them accountable to the people. Schools must make “adequate yearly progress” (defined by their state) toward achieving proficiency on each test, and students in schools that repeatedly fail these tests have federal money given to them to provide for a tutoring service or other supplemental service to aid in their education. That in a nutshell is the NCLB.