Exhibit A

The Obama administration effectively gutted the Bush-era No Child Left Behind law on Monday. Federal Education Secretary Arne Duncan offered states a way out of the decade-long policy, much despised in the education establishment, intended to hold states accountable for their systems. A waiver program will exempt from some provisions states that agree to host of education reforms the White House favors - from tougher evaluation systems for teachers and principals to programs tackling the achievement gap for minority students.

Virginia officials took the opportunity a few days later to argue that NCLB requirements simply are not reasonable, announcing that more than three-fifths of Virginia's public schools and 97 percent of districts failed to meet annual NCLB benchmarks in reading and mathematics. All this obscures the reality that American schools need to improve, but not because they don't meet NCLB standards.

Duncan has estimated that 18 percent of American schools will pass their NCLB requirements next year. The reason for such apparently dismal results is that the NCLB requires continually rising standards, with a goal that 100 percent of students, regardless of race, poverty level or disability, be "proficient" (with the states allowed to define "proficiency") in reading and mathematics by 2014. The bulk of the law's accountability provisions are aimed at children from low-income families.

As the standards continue to rise, however, meeting them becomes increasingly difficult so that more and more schools, districts, and states are classed as "failing." Schools and districts that fail to meet the improvement standards face sanctions from the state, such as allowing students to transfer to higher-performing schools and offering free tutoring, and states that don't meet overall standards are supposed to face sanctions from the federal government, including possibly withholding education dollars.

Educators say 100 percent proficiency is unrealistic and that schools that already perform well cannot be expected to continue making significant improvements. Exhibit A is Virginia, where Department of Education officials said Thursday that preliminary figures show 697 of Virginia's 1,839 schools or 38 percent made "adequate yearly progress" under the federal law based on performance on state standardized tests in 2010-11. Last year 61 percent hit their targets. Four out of 132 divisions made the proficiency benchmarks: Highland County and the cities of Lexington, Norton and West Point. Twelve divisions made the cut last year.

Virginia's Superintendent of Public Instruction Patricia I. Wright said the Virginia results show how the law misidentifies schools as failing to make the grade because not all subgroups are able to achieve the required pass rates at the same rate. She repeated that Virginia will ask the U.S. Department of Education for relief from certain requirements of NCLB.

However, Amy Wilkins, a vice president at the Education Trust in Washington, which pushes for the closure of achievement gaps, told the Christian Science Monitor that the states backed themselves into a corner. "For many years, [a lot of states] had very, very small goals, hoping that NCLB would go away before we got to the deadline."

When NCLB was introduced, some conservative commentators applauded the idea of the federal government insisting that states get serious about improving their education systems or face monetary penalties, and that evaluations be tied to objective standards. Others objected that the law would simply allow a distant, meddling federal bureaucracy to cause more problems than it solved without forcing serious improvements in American schools.

Clearly the NCLB is not accomplishing what its supporters hoped. Duncan pointed out, for example, that it gives states a perverse incentive to keep standards low so "improving" is easier. American schools are still underperforming compared to other major industrialized countries while spending far more per student ($7,700 each, about $2,000 more than the next closest country, the United Kingdom). The latest three-yearly OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) report, which compares the knowledge and skills of 15-year-olds in 70 countries around the world, ranked the United States 14th out of 34 OECD countries for reading skills, 17th for science and a below-average 25th for mathematics.

On the other hand, it is not clear that yet another federal program can make states do what they have been unable to do on their own.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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