“There is a zero percent chance that we will ever reach a 100 percent target,” said Robert L. Linn, co-director of the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards and Student Testing at UCLA. “But because the title of the law is so rhetorically brilliant, politicians are afraid to change this completely unrealistic standard. They don’t want to be accused of leaving some children behind.”
It is easy to talk about demanding that “all students” do this or that, but reality is much more complex. The No Child Left Behind act should serve as warning about the dangers of ill-concieved accountability rhetoric becoming ill-concieved accountability policies.
Much more on “accountability” here (disclosure, from a friend, Sherman Dorn).
Thomas J. Mertz
AMPS 
What level of success should we expect from our schools? For instance, the MMSD is satsified with less an 60% success in Reading Recovery, the only curriculum for struggling readers. The MMSD also brags about closing the achievement gas for minority students, but 46% of the black students didn’t read at grade level in the third grade; 49% did not read at grade level in the 10th grade.