If you missed Charles Murray’s Opinion Journal article on No Child Left Behind, you can read it here.

The main point is, that the requirements imposed in NCLB to close the test-score gaps between different groups of students can be attained, or rather faked, by statistical chicanery, without changing the size of the gaps at all.

Note that all Charles’s criticisms are valid regardless of whether you think these gaps can be closed or not. Perhaps they can; perhaps they can’t; in any case, the entire effect of NCLB is not to close them, nor even to seek out ways to close them, but to encourage ed-biz administrators to cook their books.