Under the NCLB act, enacted early in Bush’s presidency, states were to test every student in grades 3–8 each year in math, reading, and science. The act was meant to bring all students to “academic proficiency” by 2014, and to ensure that each group of students—including blacks and Hispanics, who were singled out for comparative evaluation—within each school made “adequate yearly progress” toward proficiency each year. It imposed an escalating series of penalties and sanctions for schools in which the designated groups of students did not make adequate progress.
If you already know that there is a problem, which you must know to start a program like this, then adding measurements and forcing numerical improvements doesn't really do anything. Real leadership is identifying highest leverage points of intervention and acting on them.
