... Act became law which focused funding based on the number of disadvantaged students in a local school district, not necessarily proficiency data. Standards-based reform was initiated in 1994 when President Clinton reauthorized the Elementary and Secondary Education Act with the Improving America's Schools Act. It was then that the problem was defined as a low achievement across all children, but also did specify economically disadvantaged and English limited children-not racial differences. Once standard based testing came about, observable signs became apparent of racial, economic, and disadvantaged student differences in proficiency testing as seen in Figure 1. This led to the reforms that we now see in the No Child Left Behind Act. Potential causes of the achievement gap, as defined by No Child Left Behind, are due to past limited accountability of how the States and districts previously handled and defined schools that were not making adequate yearly progress, teachers that ...

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