Quick hits...

I used to teach English and Comp Sci to Philadelphia area HS students and I have to say that the No Child Left Behind program isn't just a car wreck...its sinking this country's education system faster than that iceberg sunk the Titanic - consider the following:

* When I was in a senior HS in the 80's, long before No Child, I went through my classes, learned what I was being taught, and then found, the next year in college, that I had already learned in my senior year much of what the college wanted me to in my freshman year there. If my teachers were forced to teach to a standardized test, which is what is happening in school districts all across the USA right now, I wouldn't have been anywhere near as prepared to face college life as I was.

*Currently teachers in many HS's across the nation are teaching almost solely from handouts in order to prepare their students for the standardized tests that the students will be facing.

* The model that the government used when designing No Child is that of communism - the same model used by the Soviet Union from the 1940's to the 1980's...the FAILED MODEL the Soviets used.

* Many teachers are afraid to use "teachable moments" from outside the classroom, because they feel that the students might fall behind in their test preparation.

* and my favorite - If a school has too large a percentage of its student population fail the state testing, the school will either lose federal funding, or won't qualify for it. The schools most likely to miss out, due to academic issues, are the inner city schools that most need the funding (possibly the worst logic I've ever seen - picture Bush in his Texas drawl, "Well, if ya show us ya don't need the extra help, then we'll be happy ta help ya out.")

I'm amazed by these studies that are released that "identify the problems" in education in the inner cities - too often, I feel like I'm reading a detailing of one of the symptoms, and some stopgap solution for it. I worked with these students for half a decade, and let me tell ya, it starts in the home...
Too many times for parent-teacher nights, I would see the parents of the kids that had no problems (ie: the parents that were giving support and making sure the kids did their homework, etc.), but I almost never saw the parents of the kids that weren't doing their work. Additionally, more often than not, it was obvious that those students had no desire to be there,and they viewed school as little more than either a social function, or a place where they could make their drug connections.
Bottom line, after five years of washing student blood out of my clothes from breaking up fights, and a few years of the government saying, in essence, that I couldn't challenge my students to do better, I walked away.