Once hailed as a historic new federal commitment to educational equity, today the No Child Left Behind law inspires fear and loathing from coast to coast.

Every one of the 50 states has introduced legislation rejecting all or part of NCLB. Several have filed lawsuits against it. More than 10,000 schools nationally have been put on NCLB’s infamous list of “schools in need of improvement” and face an escalating series of sanctions that address neither their needs nor their challenges. Thousands more will be added to the list in the next few years as increasing numbers of schools are squeezed in the tightening vise of unreachable “Adequate Yearly Progress” (AYP) test targets and inadequate resources.

So far, efforts to make NCLB more reasonable have been largely futile. Revised guidelines allow schools to exempt more of their most severely disabled special education students from NCLB tests. Rules that require schools to give tests to limited English proficient (LEP) students in languages they don’t know have been modified slightly. States have been allowed to manipulate thresholds for “proficiency.” These changes have helped limit, temporarily, the number of “failing” schools.

But none of this tinkering has altered the fundamental problems with the law.

Districts remain under mandate to reach 100 percent passing rates on state tests for all students by 2014. All districts are now required to give math and language tests in every grade three through eight, and once in high school. Required science tests must be added this year. The testing plague is spreading so fast even the companies making millions off it are having trouble keeping up. Many of the new tests are poorly made and even more unreliable than existing ones. As researcher Walt Haney of Boston College has noted, “There is more public oversight of the pet industry and the food we feed our dogs than there is for the quality of tests we make our kids take.”

The overuse and misuse of standardized tests is only the start of the problems with NCLB. NCLB uses these test scores to impose sanctions that have no record of success as school improvement strategies, and in fact are not really educational strategies at all. They are political strategies designed to promote privatization and market reform.

The best known of these sanctions are NCLB’s transfer and supplemental tutorial provisions. Both encourage students (and not necessarily the “failing” students) to transfer to other schools and/or seek tutoring, mostly from private companies. Both channel funds and resources away from struggling schools and leave them further behind.

But the law’s more drastic measures for schools in “Corrective Action” – schools that miss AYP for four or five years – are about to become more familiar. After five years, the choices include reopening the school as a charter school, replacing all or most of the school staff, turning over school operations either to the state or to an outside entity, or some other “major restructuring of the school’s governance arrangement.”

These sanctions are a formula for chaos, not school improvement. Some require large sums of money that NCLB does not provide. Others are a license to sell off public schools to private management firms.

None of these strategies has any record of success when it comes to addressing the problems of educational inequality and academic achievement gaps that trigger their imposition. Researcher Gerald Bracey pointed out that NCLB uses the phrase “scientifically based research” 111 times, but has “zero” scientific evidence to support the sanctions it imposes on the schools to improve performance. State education agencies are rapidly being overwhelmed by the number of schools identified for “restructuring.”

One problem is the absence of funding to support the new sanctions NCLB imposes. The legislation does have language creating a special school improvement fund. But the president has never requested, and Congress has never authorized, any money for it. Instead, NCLB “school improvement funds” are taken by diverting funds from Title I – originally designed to support schools with high concentrations of poor students – to state education departments for plans to implement sanctions.

NCLB’s policy framework is toxic, bad for the health of schools and children and driven by ideological political objectives. It makes no commitment to bridging the deep social inequalities reflected in academic achievement gaps, but demands that schools make them disappear (and it demands more of poorer, diverse schools than richer, homogeneous ones). When schools fall short of the impossible, they face punitive sanctions that weaken their ability to serve all students, ultimately increasing educational inequality instead of reducing it.

Some advocates for children, desperate for signs of hope amidst the policies emanating from Washington, have struggled mightily to find positives in NCLB. They point to the pressure on schools to account for all students, the promise of better choices for parents in the poorest communities, the emphasis on improving teacher qualifications. But six years of inconsistent, underfinanced implementation has made good on none of these promises.

Reasonable people may continue to differ on various aspects of NCLB, but the core of the law has been laid inescapably bare: tests, more tests, and punitive sanctions that create a systematic and misleading impression of failure and that hurt public education far more than they help those who have been poorly served by it.