Maryland has won relief from one of the most criticized aspects of the No Child Left Behind law, allowing it to avoid rigid federal sanctions and design its own methods for improving schools.

The federal law has been persistently bashed for treatingfailing schools the same whether they miss the achievement standards by a small or wide margin. But now that Maryland is participating in the differentiated accountability system, it will separate failing schools into two categories: one for schools where students taken as a whole fail to meet standards, and another where one or two demographic subgroups of students fail to meet standards.