A big Washington Post story published today is drawing some attention for its candid discussion of an aspect of NCLB that has been the focus of a lot of hype and criticism by liberal and conservative opponents to the law alike. The issue in play is the law's goal that all students be "proficient" at grade level by the year 2014, a goal which even the most optimistic of supporters admit is far from realistic.

Critics of NCLB, as the article points out, describe the unreachable proficiency goal as evidence that the law was destined for failure from the get go, and that the upshot so far has been undue focus on standardized tests as schools and states seek haphazardly to meet standards at any costs. The harshest opponents to the law, a number of them teachers unions (though not all teachers unions, as the AFT has been quick to point out) and liberal educators, go so far as to suggest that the 100% proficiency goal was set as a sinister ploy by conservative anti-public education, pro-school choice lawmakers out to use the implausible goal in 2014 as a smoking gun that public schools have failed and should be replaced by a private market system of schooling.

The more realistic version of the facts, the story goes on to discuss, is that the 100% proficiency goal has its roots in political grandstanding by its original bi-partisan supporters, and not in an anti-public school conspiracy. Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy, a key crafter of the law, said that even if the 100 percent standard is, "not achievable," it still serves to inspire teachers and students to work hard. Republican Senator Lamar Alexander agreed with the importance of the 100% goal, equating it with a similar lofty vision in the Declaration of Independence, saying, "Are we going to rewrite the Declaration of Independence and say only 85 percent of men are created equal?"

As a practical matter, nobody really disagrees with the desirability of a day when all children are proficient in reading and math in America. Yet critics have found clever ways of distorting what the law actually says to make it seem absurd - for example by referring to the proficiency standard as an unrealistic demand that all children be "perfect" by 2014. In reality, whether a child is "proficient" is up for each state to determine (and several states have already taken the predictable easy road of lowering the bar so that kids are found to be 'proficient' when just a year before they would have been measured as basic or below basic), and it never means getting 100% on every test. In fact, the way the law measures "proficiency" with regard to sub-group improvement as an annual measure, combined with exceptions granted to certain special education and limited language cases makes it such that the 100% goal is more like a 95% goal as education expert Andy Rotherham has observed; NCLB's goal is that most kids to be proficient by 2014.

So at the end of the day, what will come of the 2014 goal when the law is reauthorized in the next months (or, more likely, years)? It will be extremely difficult for politicians, from a rhetorically stand point, to back away from the stated goal of the law - to do so would amount to "back sliding", as the President has described it, on millions of American children, most of them poor and minority. Instead, look for more states to start gaming the system and suddenly define lower and lower absolute scores on tests as meeting the definition of proficiency, look for more exceptions to be granted to hard case students who are harder to get above the bar, and look for growth based models of assessment to play a larger and larger role in determining how we evaluate schools and whether or not they're succeeding, reducing in effect some of the attention to the proficiency standard itself.