Nineteen of the district's 21 schools -- including Las Palmitas -- have not met the federal law's performance benchmarks for four years. Now the entire district faces sanctions for the first time.

"We have hardworking, dedicated, trained teachers like everybody else. They've got to teach a language, they've got to teach the content, and they've got to counter poverty," said Foch "Tut" Pensis, the district's superintendent. "We are the poster child for NCLB."

California has 97 school districts that failed to meet their goals under the law for four years, more than twice as many failing districts as any other state so far. Kentucky has the next highest number facing sanctions, with 47.

Nationwide, 411 school districts in 27 states now face intervention.
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Over the next few years, hundreds more districts are destined to enter the next phase that California already has begun. The state has ordered districts to undergo everything from reporting how they are implementing the federal law to having a team of specialists assess every aspect of their operations. In the most extreme cases, California districts could be subject to a state takeover.

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Many states already are losing revenue due to the sliding economy. California's budget deficit for the fiscal year that begins this summer is projected to be anywhere from $15 billion to $20 billion.

No Child Left Behind sought to shine a light on inequality in the nation's education system, where schools have been accused of setting lower expectations for poor and minority children. Nationwide, black and Hispanic students consistently lag behind their white and Asian peers in performance, a chasm referred to as the achievement gap.
(The same lie--say it often enough, and perhaps it will be believed)
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Sliding scale of punishment
U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings says California is taking the right steps. It is the first state to take widespread action against all its districts that have failed to meet the achievement target set by No Child Left Behind.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the state's elected Superintendent of Public Instruction, Jack O'Connell, proposed the sliding scale of punishment for the 97 districts -- which are responsible for educating nearly a third of California's 6.3 million students.

Their approach reserves severe measures, such as replacing administrators or a takeover by the state, for districts that have shown the least improvement.

"He is the first governor to kind of embrace this law, to take it on himself, to be acting for it, and in keeping completely with the spirit of No Child Left Behind," Spellings said in an interview.

By taking action now, California can collect $45 million from the federal government. The districts facing the most severe sanctions each will receive $250,000 in federal money to pay for intervention teams and to start following their suggestions.

Shortfall of qualified teachers
They will need to hire turnaround experts, new principals and coaches, and many more teachers to replace those judged to be ineffective. Where the districts will find those top-quality educators is unknown. California expects to face a shortage of as many as 100,000 qualified teachers in the next decade, even without changes to its existing school system.

"I think it's going to take leadership, commitment and expectations," she said. "It's just like with the kids: If you think you have a bunch of kids who can't get to grade level, that's what you have. If you think you have superstars, that's what you have."

With half the black and Hispanic students in the country dropping out before graduation, anything less than aggressive action to turn around the failing districts is unacceptable, Spellings said. Under some of the states' current improvement plans, it would take some districts more than 100 years to bring students' reading and math skills to grade level.

"The accountability -- all the testing, all the data, all the stuff we do -- are meaningless unless we have real consequences for failure," Spellings said.

Once, not so long ago, California schools were the envy of the nation.
The central criticisms laid on NCLB (those that are reported by the media, occasionally) are that the testing used measures largely conformity and lock-step regurgitation, that the entire program and the testing itself fail to take into consideration the cultural and economic circumstances that the individual districts must cope with, and there is no carrot---only a big stick. A reasonable person might agree.

From a different point of view, the entire program can be looked at from two interesting perspectives. From the political one, it was a device to support and validate the bad idea of school vouchers, thereby punishing the schools in trouble by siphoning off the students who were more likely to succeed, leaving the disadvantaged kids without even a role model for success, no dough---and no political clout.
From a sociological point of view, one might see a deeper representation here- the definition, isolation and punishment of the "THEM".

In the eyes of many voters, these are Obama's cultural and ethnic roots, and peers.

America's ability to continue to ignore the ocean of victims produced by our dreams of empire depends on the maintenance of what Chomsky calls the "Unworthy Victim". Redefining most of the population of the world as "THEM" is a big part of how this is done. A huge part of our own population is, and has always been, "THEM". Hence travesties like this,--and our incredible prison population.
President Obama would shake the foundations of our definition of "THEM".
Bout Time.
--Long Shot.