You don't need cheaters to reach a point where the expectations are so high they are unattainable. If you read the growth measures listed on the government educ

You don't need cheaters to reach a point where the expectations are so high they are unattainable. If you read the growth measures listed on the government education sites you'll see that states have proposed plans with ridiculous claims such as having ALL students passing their exams by 2014. While there are modified calculations for special education students this is still almost certainly unachievable in reality. A perfect example would be the high school that I attended. This is a school in a small community (40k people when I attended, maybe 60k now) with a significant amount of wealth. The high school specifically has received massive amounts of donations for both academics and sports. Since the inception of NCLB the school has routinely made AYP however in 2008-2009 the school did not. The reason the school didn't is entirely due to students receiving "Individualized Education Plans" (IEP). With the mainstreaming of special needs and special education students this means that an entire school is being placed on the needs improvement list due to a small subset of the population receiving special education services. I fully expect that in the next three to five years the vast majority of schools that have routinely made AYP will no longer be able to show adequate growth. When the children of upper middle class families start attending "failing" schools you'll start to hear a lot of complaints about NCLB.