GET REAL, MY BROTHER!

As a career educator (31 years and counting), I can tell you emphatically that No Child Left Behind is leaving a tremendous number of Black children behind... and Hispanics. The only children who seem unaffected are Asian children. NCLB is an unfunded mandate that allows the government to withdraw what little funding it gives localities when those localities do not produce children who can pass assinine, arbitrary tests, prepared under the auspices of big business. ... as if Black children weren't having enough difficulty already.
I grew up in an era when teachers were the "sages on the stage", who stood up and lectured and spouted all the things they knew... and then I learned to learn for myself. That was when TRUE EDUCATION began. Teaching to the tests only gives children the knowledge on the test... no more and no less... and not enough. Come on now... do you want your children to grow up knowing only as much as ...say... George Bush? Real teachers teach... and never stop learning!
Education is already the most thankless profession there is... with the lowest pay for professionals of any career. Now you're asking teachers to do more and get paid less, which is what happens when the funding gets cut. Do you really want that to happen? Some people would have you believe that NCLB is working because statistics show that fewer children are failing, when what's really happening is that more children are dropping out, getting put into unfair alternative learning situations, or simply don't take the tests, at the encouragement of those "educators" (and I use the term here loosely) who know that these children cannot possibly pass the tests.
NCLB is a cruel joke! (and that article, as Macbeth would say, is "a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury... signifying nothing!)