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No Child Left Behind is a farce! It was a farce from the get-go. It was an oxymoron, never intending to be something that actually helped education. It was a backdoor attempt to destroy education, make our schools fail, and create an open door for vouchers.

The truth is politicians know that fixing education costs too much. They know that to do it right, we are going to have to spend a whole lot more on it than we currently are. They know that to help impoverished schools, we are going to have to offer resources like we never have before. But none of them have the courage to admit it. They want to do it on the cheap. Fixing something as large and complex as public education is going to cost us . . . BIG TIME!

So what politicians do is provide smoke screens. They come up with fancy phrases, terminology, ideological solutions that down deep they know they cannot use. But they are great for campaigns, for speeches, and for getting elected.

The problem they run into is that their electorate expects them to act on what they've promised. Therein lies their problem. They may genuinely want to improve things but when faced with the budget realities of government, they find themselves creating fake, ridiculous programs like "No Child Left Behind" to give the appearance that something is being done.

What this idiotic law did do was create a system by which every school will eventually become a failing school. Even schools with high test scores in geographically desirable areas will fall prey to the "failing school" label in time. Why? Because the requirements where so unrealistic to begin with, no school could meet them indefinitely.

The devil was in the details. The details included an elaborate punitive and downright crazy set of rules and requirements, while tying the hands of administrators trying to adhere to them.

Schools were supposed to increase test scores until 100% of the student body was achieving 80% or above. This includes special education students and English language learners. Those two subgroups alone can take a high scoring school and cause them to be reclassified as failing. Children with legitimate handicaps, through no fault of their own, can bring an entire, well performing school to its knees.

The tests also present a ridiculous oxymoronic dilemma. They have not been criterion based for the majority of this law's existence. Most standardized tests are norm referenced tests or have some norm referenced questions in them. These tests' purpose is to create

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