"No Child Left Behing" is niether the "Cause" nor the "Solution" to our education system problems. I wish people would quit compaining about this useless burocratic solution to a local problem and start focusing on the local problems.

It's possible "No Child Left Behind" is mis-guided, but focusing on fighting it doesn't help our children or our education system. It's just another yardstick to measure our education system by (even if it is a "bad" one). Saying all our problems are because of No Child Left Behind doesn't help.

Education is just another industry that refused to monitor itself, so after hearing a lot of complaints the Feds decided to step in and force them to measure using their criteria (which rarely a equitable solution).

In her article, Marjorie Cortez mentioned one of her favorite yardsticks was the Sterling Scholar program. That's fine but it illustrates the problem. If each reporter, each parent, each district, each teacher, has their own yardstick, most people are going to keep using their favorite yardstick to measure quality education, so most of the people are going to be unhappy their yardstick isn't used.

We need to focus on moving on and doing better instead of complaining about the yardstick and focusing our effort on manipulating it to fit our favorite criteria.

Marjorie, you get the big picture...No Child Left Behind is a joke. It was established to discredit public schools. Thanks for reminding parents it is NOT a good yardstick to determine the success of their teachers or their schools.

How can they get away with unfunded mandates? Because they fund some of the education budget in the first place. If our schools didn't rely on federal funding in the first place then NCLB would hold no sway.

I think the ideal solution would be take the money we pay to the federal government which they use on education, and pay it instead to the state governments. Then the states will be fully in control of local education.

With all the anti-NCLB rhetoric in the press these days it is no wonder the Utah education bureaucracy looks like a circus act. Where else on planet earth would a group of so called "professionals" get to insist on more funding and less accountability, all with the whiny afterthought that it's not fair to expect kids to perform better each year. Not to mention that the NCLB proficiency goals are essentially failing grades, anyway. Yeah, expecting 75% of our kids to perform at 49% proficiency is too high? And Utah's answer is U-Pass. If they're not performing well, just lower the standard, that's a great solution! It's pathetic and it's the reason education in the USA is openly mocked by the countries passing us up. Of course the feds aren't the answer, but the states have allowed the ludicrous blather of union brainwashed fools to set education policy so long that real world thinking and pragmatic, innovative improvements can't even be considered these days. And when the states have brain freeze, who else has the power to step in and say, "WAKE UP." BTW, Marjorie, NCLB started three presidents ago and has been bi-partisan all along. Utahns, GET A CLUE!

I think that No Child Left Behind law is a joke because no one is doing anything to make it so that there is no child left behind. The no child left behind law does not help children. It is established to discredit public schools. Yeah, expecting 100% of our kids to perform at 60% proficiency is too high. The kids need to be able to think on their own and not have to get hammered for not thinking on their own. I think the solution to this problem it to get rid of NCLB. If we get rid of it then we won�t have all of these complaints and then the world will be a better place. GET A CLUE PEOPLE!!!!!!!!!!!!!