We are now in year five of No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Once hailed as a historic new federal commitment to leave no child behind, today NCLB inspires fear and loathing from coast to coast — and beyond. Puerto Rico and Hawaii hate it too.

Every one of the 50 states has introduced legislation rejecting all or part of NCLB. Several have filed lawsuits against it. More than 10,000 schools have been put on NCLB's infamous list of "schools in need of improvement" and face an escalating series of sanctions that address neither their needs nor their challenges. Thousands more will be added to the list in the next few years as increasing numbers of schools are squeezed in the tightening vise of unreachable "adequate yearly progress" (AYP) test targets and inadequate resources. This year more than a quarter of all public schools (nearly 23,000) failed to reach AYP. Missing AYP two years in a row earns a spot on the list.

Today, NCLB is almost as unpopular as the administration and Congress that created it. With the law coming up for reauthorization in 2007, debate is heating up about whether we need Band-Aids to "fix" NLCB or a bulldozer to bury it.

So far, efforts to make NCLB more reasonable have been largely futile. Margaret Spellings, the new secretary of education, has used less inflammatory rhetoric than her predecessor (Rod "the NEA is a terrorist organization" Paige). But her department's much-lauded "flexibility" about NCLB regulations has been marginal. New guidelines allow schools to exempt more of their most severely disabled special education students from NCLB tests. Rules that require schools to give tests to limited English proficient (LEP) students in languages they don't know and then remove them from that category as soon as they know enough English to improve their scores have been modified slightly. States have been allowed to manipulate thresholds for "proficiency" and vary the number of students required before a subgroup's scores count. These changes have helped limit, temporarily, the number of "failing" schools, though a new study from the Harvard Civil Rights Project indicates that many of the changes have allowed more wealthy and white districts to avoid penalties imposed on poorer districts with more students of color.

But none of this tinkering has altered the fundamental problems with the law. Districts remain under mandate to reach 100 percent passing rates on state tests for all students by 2014. Next year, all districts are required to give math and language tests in every grade three through eight, and once in high school. Required science tests must be added by 2007–08. The testing plague is spreading so fast even the companies making millions off it are having trouble keeping up. The Education Sector, a Washington, D.C., research group, recently estimated that public schools, which already give more than 33 million tests under NCLB, must add another 11.4 million by the end of the current school year. With states spending only about $20 per student developing these tests, many are poorly made and even more unreliable than existing ones. Thirty-five percent of state testing offices reported a "significant error" by a testing contractor in scoring a state test since 2000. As researcher Walt Haney of Boston College has noted, "There is more public oversight of the pet industry and the food we feed our dogs than there is for the quality of tests we make our kids take."