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With the election fast approaching, I'm running out of time to pick on my favorite whipping boy, George W. Bush. So today I offer you a trip down memory lane to a time before the Patriot Act, before the Iraq invasion, before the mortgage meltdown, when crude oil was $27.00 a barrel and gas was $1.70 per gallon and the world's glaciers were all bigger than they are now. Bush's approval rating back then was well above 50% and it looked like he might luck out and be able to go down in history as just another mediocre president. I offer you a nostalgic look at Bush's very first failure, that little gem called, No Child Left Behind, and we'll answer the question, "What happens when an American President with a junior-high-school mentality decides that other people need to become smarter?"

No Child Left Behind, like all government initiatives, is laden with unnecessary complexity and written in management-speak and in-group lingo so as to make it intentionally obtuse and nearly impossible to understand. Its benchmarks are deliberately vague and ambiguous, as are its stated objectives. This makes it hard to cite its most egregious flaws, but I'll attempt to pull out the worst of what is, overall, quite pathetic.

A school can be sanctioned if more than 40% of the students fall below the 40th percentile. When the rule makers wrote this astounding mandate, some well-intentioned statistician should have stepped forward and explained to them what constitutes a percentile. The 40th percentile of any group is, by definition, the bottom 40% of the group according to whatever is being measured. The membership or makeup of that group can change as individual people improve or slide back, but the bottom 40% will always fall below the 40th percentile. If 45% fall below that mark, then it's no longer the 40th percentile. It's the 45th percentile. And there will always be a bottom 40% unless the group is perfectly homogenous. Percentiles don't exist in homogenous groups since they are a component of variation. A statistically (and mathematically) ambiguous and illogical rule like this helps explain why the students tutored under No Child Left Behind now rank #25 in the world in their mathematics proficiency. Furthermore, I personally believe that the sub-prime foreclosure mess was enabled by a deplorable lack of basic arithmetic understanding in a huge portion of our population. A math Illiterate make an easy financial victim. This stuff matters.

No Child Left Behind also measures

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