An article by Richard Rothstein, nicely summarizes the flaws of the NCLB.
Html version at American Prospect or PDF from Mr. Rothstein's employer, EPI.

Our No. 1 education program is incoherent, unworkable, and doomed. But the next president still can have a huge impact on improving American schooling.

Here are a few interesting comments by Mr. Rothstein at a conference in 2006:

Richard Rothstein, Research Associate at the Economic Policy Institute, said, "Nothing can save NCLB unless we jettison the incoherent demand that all students be proficient by 2014." Rothstein focused on what he sees as a fundamental contradiction in the law: "Standards cannot be simultaneously challenging and achievable for all students. Proficiency for all is an oxymoron." Rothstein added that NCLB’s focus on either unachievable or meaningless goals undermines public education: "[the law is] not simply trying to do something good and failing; it is doing enormous damage."

Rothstein and Linn both advocated alternatives to the 100 percent proficiency requirement. Rothstein proposed measuring progress towards elimination of statistical gaps between the scores of various populations of students. Linn proposed measuring progress by looking at "effect sizes" -- increases in the mean score of groups of students.

Manny Rivera, Superintendent for the Rochester, New York School District, concurred, telling the audience of schools in his district that have made great progress and have even won awards for their performance, yet under NCLB's accountability system the schools are considered "in need of improvement." "NCLB's accountability system undermines true educational reform and is a very demoralizing system for those of us working in the schools," said Rivera, who called for locally-based accountability systems and a withdrawal of NCLB’s sanctions on low-performing schools, which he said have no basis in research or evidence.