The bill had unanimous support up until its final Senate hurdle. Legislative leaders and Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. agreed to hold off on the bill until an April 20 special session to give Utah more time to negotiate with the federal government on NCLB flexibility.

Tim Bridgewater, the governor's education deputy, who has met four times with federal officials, believes the special education testing flexibility will come, but not all other requests.

"At this point, we have not received the flexibility we have requested," Bridgewater said. "The governor would sign the bill as it passes the Legislature."

But some, both in and outside of Utah's borders, question whether that would be a good thing.

Anti-NCLB sentiment is common among states. Tuesday, Connecticut announced it was preparing a lawsuit challenging NCLB as an underfunded mandate, the first state to do so.

But Utah so far has been the most bold legislatively and has garnered some criticism.

A Tuesday editorial in The New York Times lambasted Utah as simply not wanting to close the achievement gap. The editorial refers to U-PASS as weak and not collecting student data based on race and ethnicity.

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings apparently plans to give states some flexibility — with a catch. The Associated Press reports she would give preferential treatment to states proving they will raise achievement in return.

U-PASS rules require schools to report achievement of different student groups. But it doesn't hold them accountable for each group's achievement, said Charlie Hausman, assistant superintendent in the ethnically diverse Salt Lake City School District.

In other words, he says, the state could deem a school as doing well when it really is leaving Hispanic students in the dust, for instance.

"It is true U-PASS will report disaggregated data, but it is not true that there would be subgroup accountability at this point," Hausman said. "There are some requests that it's appropriate (for the federal government) to say no to because they're not the right thing to do."

Also at issue is Utah's plan to require schools to have at least 40 students in each group before they're held accountable for their achievement under NCLB.

The current requirement is 10 students in a group.

Changing that to 40 would make it so two, instead of the current 29 schools, would be held accountable for achievement of black third- through eighth-graders, Hausman said.

That concerns Charles Henderson, a member of the Coalition of Minorities Advisory Committee to the State Board of Education.