The Arizona Capital Times calls them "revolts"...
The first salvos of a long-threatened attack on President Bush’s signature education law now have been launched in what amounts to a grassroots rebellion against the No Child Left Behind [NCLB] Act. Simmering frustrations from state and local officials over the 2002 law’s costs, testing requirements and penalties have erupted into open conflict with the Utah Legislature voting April 19 to challenge obedience to the federal law, and the nation’s largest teachers’ union filing suit against the act in federal court April 20. The state of Connecticut is preparing a separate lawsuit seeking full funding of NCLB’s provisions.Recent efforts by Bush education officials to head off a backlash failed to stop this week’s challenges to the law, which Congress passed with bipartisan support to close education gaps between rich and poor, white and minority students...
...while Chester Finn calls them "tantrums":
Dozens of states are throwing toddler-style tantrums about the rules and expectations of the No Child Left Behind Act - notable among them Connecticut, which plans to sue the federal government on grounds that the law is an "unfunded mandate."The Bush administration's olive branch is a pledge of a "new, common-sense approach" to compliance and "additional flexibility" on testing and accountability for states that have made progress on NCLB's goal: closing the gap between the academic achievement of poor and minority students and their wealthier, whiter fellow students.
Does this new flexibility mean that adult interests will again trump the needs of children? It's looking that way.
Diane Ravitch looks for the compromise in the Wall Street Journal ($ubscription required), and reminds readers that the reasons underlying the need for the act haven't disappeared:
The critics of NCLB think that it was modeled on education reforms in Texas and that it sprang full-blown from the brow of President Bush. They think they can undermine NCLB if only they can expose shortcomings in Texas's schools. But NCLB is not going away because it is the product of many years of bipartisan demands for changes in the role of the federal government, especially in meeting its responsibilities to poor children...Posted by kswygert at April 25, 2005 04:53 PMNCLB will not come up for renewal until 2007. Until then, there will be griping by those who don't like the new federal role in education and those who don't want to see children tested every year. But it seems safe to predict that the next renewal will strengthen the law rather than weaken it. After all, annual testing is hardly a new idea in American education. Not just reading, math and science, but history too is likely to become part of the NCLB mandate for testing.
What is valuable about the law is its insistence that districts measure their progress in helping the children who can't meet state standards. Raising achievement across the board will be hard -- but it is not mission impossible.