Adequate Yearly Progress Act Analysis

Federalism is the concept where the power to govern is shared between the central governing unit and the constituent political units, and in the United States, this is the United States government and the States of the Union. This article from the Huffington Post describes the NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND ACT, passed approximately ten years ago, which was an attempt by the federal government to improve the failing education system in the United States. Each state had different standards to what they were measuring their students to. The idea of this act was to establish a baseline and start to improve it. This Act provides funding to the states with the intention of providing fair and equal opportunity to a high quality education. In reality,
"As states faced NCLB's 100 percent proficiency rate requirement, they just lowered the bar for what test score would indicate proficiency," Fuller explained.
NCLB's measurement of proficiency, or "Adequate Yearly Progress" (AYP), has largely been discredited due to its inability to measure growth and account for increasing performance targets. Still, NCLB provided, at the very least, some basis of comparison between state proficiency levels, especially once state standards were calibrated to federal standards measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests.
But as recently as Monday, Duncan appeared ready to ditch some of AYP's strictures. After Montana announced it would freeze its performance targets -- an action that would appear to violate NCLB -- Duncan's office chose not to strictly enforce the law and rescind the state's federal education funding. Instead, Montana education officials worked with Duncan's office and found a loophole in NCLB that allowed the state to reset its proficiency
But that's not entirely true. Rep. John Kline (R-Minn.), chairman of the House Education and the Workforce Committee, has introduced a spate of bills to his committee as part of a piecemeal approach to tackling the law in the House.
Kline's latest bill, which would remove strings from Title I funds that are reserved for disadvantaged students, brought fierce criticism. The bill's introduction largely ended what had been, until then, a bipartisan process, with Rep. George Miller (D-Calif) calling it a "complete betrayal of education equality" and "a knife in the back to the bipartisan process."
Fuller attributes the legislative breakdown to Republican strategizing. He says conservatives never liked the bipartisan nature of NCLB to begin with, and Republicans not wish to give Obama a perceived win on education policy as the 2012 election looms.
"They would like to see NCLB implode and suffer from a slow death," Fuller said. "Then we're back to a totally federalist system of education," he added, noting that prior to NCLB, education policy was, for the most part, the sole dominion of