No Child Left Behind
The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, President George W. Bush's education-reform bill, was signed into law on Jan. 8, 2002. By all accounts, it is the most sweeping education-reform legislation since 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson passed his landmark Elementary and Secondary Education Act. (Technically, the new bill is a reauthorization and revision of that 1965 legislation.) It dramatically increases the role of the federal government in guaranteeing the quality of public education for all children in the United States -- with an emphasis on increased funding for poor school districts, higher achievement for poor and minority students, and new measures to hold schools accountable for their students' progress -- and in the process dramatically expands the role of standardized testing in American public education, requiring that students in grades 3 through 8 be tested every year in reading and math.
The debate over the bill's testing and accountability provisions centered on such questions as whether states would maintain control over their own standards and tests, how the new mandates would be funded, how test results would be reported, where the bar would be set for defining proficiency and adequate progress, how schools would be held accountable, and whether states' test scores would be compared against an independent national benchmark, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).
Here is a brief summary of how the final legislation came out on these issues, followed by links to the Education Department and House Committee websites for more detailed information, and to selected articles analyzing the outcome of the bill.
More...
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/schools/nochild/nclb.html