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[Paul Cory <paulcory AT mac.com>]

We've had some good discussions about education here.  For all of you 
who are interested, the N&O actually has a good article on the impact of 
the Federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) today.

http://www.newsobserver.com/front/story/1430303p-1463135c.html

Unless the law changes, the fights over public school funding are going 
to get a lot more intense. In short, the law requires that every 
identified subgroup (including ethnicity) at a school must meet certain 
goals on the state's end-of-grade tests, or else the school fails. The 
state standards simply measure the success of the school as a whole  
(although DPI does keep track of certain subgroups already).

In NC, that means about 73% of elementary and middle schools would have 
failed by the federal definition last year, and we're doing well, 
relative ot other states. Nationwide, some states are estimating  that 
10% or fewer of their schools would have passed the federal standards 
last year.

The impact of the NCLB would seem to be pretty straightforward: either 
more resources will have to be made available for education, or existing 
resources will have to be redirected to provide more help for those 
lagging subgroups, which will cause some loss of opportunity for the 
high achieving children in public schools (a majority of whom are white 
and asian in NC).

In regards to the previous discussion of Linux in the schools, the need 
for more resources to meet the federal standards should make some school 
administrators more receptive to the Free Software pitch - although all 
the stumbling blocks I laid out earlier will still have to be overcome.

Paul