”The Obama administration estimates that 82% of the nation’s public schools could fall short of federal standards this year, grades that are not only embarrassing but also mean government intervention for some of them.

In a report to Congress on Wednesday, Education Secretary Arne Duncan was urging Congress to change the federal standards so that failing grades are awarded only to the schools most in need of help.

The law known as No Child Left Behind set up an aggressive review designed to make all public school students proficient in reading and math by 2014.

One of Obama’s objections to the standards is that they rise each year, so that even schools that are improving can fail to make their ”annual yearly progress” marks.

”No Child Left Behind is broken and we need to fix it now,” Duncan says in prepared remarks for testimony before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. ”This law has created a thousand ways for schools to fail and very few ways to help them succeed. We should get out of the business of labeling schools as failures and create a new law that is fair and flexible, and focused on the schools and students most at risk.”

[”82% of U.S. public schools could fail ”No Child Left Behind’ review, Obama administration says; Education Secretary Arne Duncan urges Congress to change the federal law's requirements so that only the worst schools get failing grades and face government intervention,” by Christi Parsons, Los Angeles Times, March 9, 2011.]

There’s a simple way to ”fix” NCLB: Repeal it!

Thanks to my reader-researcher, RC.