When the federal No Child Left Behind Act was passed by a bipartisan majority in Congress and signed by President Bush in 2002, its goal was to have nearly all children in federally funded school districts performing at grade level in math and reading by 2014. To accomplish this, NCLB imposed stringent new reporting requirements. Among the benefits of these requirements was that school districts could no longer hide their failure to adequately educate minority and disabled students under aggregate test scores.

A decade later, the federal law is being gutted in more than half the states — including Maryland, Virginia and D.C. — by waivers granted by Education Secretary Arne Duncan.