News Leader: It's time to scrap No Child Left Behind

In an editorial in today's edition, the Springfield News-Leader suggests that it is time to get rid of the federal No Child Left Behind act:

Indeed, the ideas of measuring student performance, making such measurements public and providing real incentive for every student and every school to improve are valid.
The problem is that No Child Left Behind never fulfilled that promise.
It's fundamental failure is in taking a snapshot of student performance and not studying true gains or losses in individuals' education. Whether this year's third-graders test better than last year's third-graders does nothing to tell us whether Johnny learned anything from third grade to fourth grade. For such accountability measures to truly work, there must be a battery of tests and other performance measures that follow students as they go through various grades.