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In December, the National Council on Teacher Quality, an independent research center that advocates more rigorous training for teachers, published a state-by-state study of the response to NCLB. Its conclusion: "Even with the 2006 deadline looming, only a handful of states appear willing to comply with the spirit of that portion of the law that seeks to correct the long-tolerated, widespread and inadequate preparation of American teachers in their subject areas. Some states are indifferent or even antagonistic about the prospect of declaring significant numbers of their active teachers unqualified."

The think tank's president Kate Walsh predicted that "in the short term, the prospects are dim for making genuine strides in improving teacher quality. The law's clarity on the academic preparation required of new teachers bodes a more promising future, but where veteran teachers are concerned the law is doomed to disappoint, save in a minority of states." The study gave only one state, Colorado, an "A" rating for demanding that all teachers either provide proof of academic content courses nearly equivalent to an undergraduate major or passing a test of subject-matter knowledge.

All of today's veteran teachers will of course retire someday, and we can hope that the states will use genuinely demanding standards to pick their successors. But NCLB leaves ample room to continue avoiding such standards. The states can adopt tests of content knowledge as easy as they choose -- and they will continue to be under pressure from the teachers' unions and other interest groups to avoid letting those tests become serious filters. According to the U.S. Department of Education's most recent nationwide data, most of the states that test for content knowledge have set the minimum passing score "so low as to screen out only the very lowest performing individuals." Some states, including Maryland, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania, have actually lowered their testing requirements for teachers since NCLB was enacted. As a tool for coaxing or pressuring the public-school establishment to adopt teacher-training reforms that threaten the establishment's own interests, the statute is a failure.

IT IS IN THE TESTING OF CHILDREN, not of teachers, that the states will have the greatest incentives to combine the appearance of tough new standards with the reality of business as usual. Here again the U.S. Department of Education has failed to take effective steps against the adoption of tests that are too easy. One sees this in comparing the states' tests with the department's own National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Though many experts consider NAEP to be too easy, it is less vulnerable to distortion than NCLB because it carries no threat of adverse consequences for states that do poorly.

According to NAEP's most recently available state-by-state results in reading, there was not one state where as many as half of 4th-graders were achieving the level of "proficiency" in reading. But according to the tests used by the states themselves, all but eight states were claiming that solid majorities of their 4th-graders were "proficient" in reading. For example, Virginia claimed that 73 percent of its 4th-graders were proficient -- though the NAEP figure for Virginia was only 35 percent. According to NAEP, the highest-achieving of all the states was Connecticut, with 43 percent proficiency; but in its own testing program Connecticut claimed proficiency of 69 percent. Those two states look like models of honesty compared with Mississippi, which claimed 87 percent proficiency in reading even though its NAEP score was only 18 percent. Such gaps are so astronomical that they make one wonder whether "proficiency" as defined by the states' public-school bureaucrats will mean anything at all. But from the triumphant rhetoric of the Department of Education and the White House, one would never know that these gaps exist.

The situation is almost certainly going to get worse. Proficiency tests are astonishingly easy to manipulate by means of various tricks that make schools seem more successful than they are, and No Child Left Behind creates huge incentives for the states to do just that. They can switch tests every few years, muddying long-term comparisons and creating the artificial appearance of short-term gains. They can abuse statistical techniques by treating the most wildly optimistic interpretation of a subgroup's test results as definitive even if there is only a microscopic possibility that that interpretation is correct. They can concentrate tutoring programs and other resources on students who are just slightly below the threshold of "proficiency," neglecting those who are well below or well above. They can fail to adopt rigorous procedures to prevent or detect cheating. In hopes that future policymakers will relax NCLB, they can set their targets for "adequate yearly progress" in such a way that they commit themselves to only modest annual advances at the outset but to much faster progress as they near the 2014 deadline.

Some states, such as Louisiana and Colorado, have already adopted "proficiency" standards, for purposes of reporting to Washington under NCLB, that are lower than the standards of their internal state assessments. The bottom line is that the more ways a state finds to lower the bar, the better that state will look. We are already seeing the predictable result: a "race to the bottom," with the most self-serving, most deceptive states setting the pattern for the others. And the U.S. Department of Education is letting them get away with it, creating the illusion that children are learning more when in fact they are being measured with a rubber yardstick.

WHERE DOES NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND go from here? Its core supporters among neo-conservative education theorists are seeking amendments to "mend it, not end it," hoping to fix its perverse incentives and other defects this year. But the Bush administration and its congressional allies have no stomach for the battles against the public-school establishment's entrenched allies on Capitol Hill that would be needed for truly substantive amendments. They firmly refuse to consider any before NCLB's scheduled reauthorization in 2007.

Moreover, even if such amendments could be passed it seems unlikely that they would deliver the results we should be seeking. The idea that mediocre schools can be transformed into excellent ones by means of centralized decrees has been thoroughly tested at the state level over the last two decades. In practice the public-school establishment has shown itself to be endlessly ingenious at evading centralized accountability systems; over time those systems have tended to drift from "tough" to "soft," with standards relaxed as interest groups mobilize against them.

The vision of a tough, pro-reform U.S. Department of Education cracking down on spineless state and local school officials depends on a classic Utopian fallacy -- comparing the concrete track record of the state and local bureaucrats with abstract plans for federal reforms. But in the real world the federal bureaucracy is even more vulnerable than the state and local ones to special-interest pressures. The teachers' unions love the Department of Education.

The Bush administration's most promising achievement in education reform is its pilot program of education vouchers for the District of Columbia -- a program far more in keeping with the administration's professed philosophy of an "ownership society" than the bureaucracy-laden NCLB. Parental choice offers the only solid hope for families trapped in dysfunctional schools: It enables them to escape immediately rather than keep waiting indefinitely for the results which the centralizers keep promising. But the administration is not even trying to revive the parental-choice provisions that it dropped from its 2001 draft of NCLB. In essence the Bush White House has done to federal education programs what the Nixon White House did to welfare programs, legitimizing the statist creations of its Democratic predecessors.

But as the example of welfare shows, such programs are judged in the long run by their actual results. By 2014 No Child Left Behind will clearly be seen to have failed, and the case for abolishing the U.S. Department of Education will be stronger than ever.

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