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Excerpt from Sudbury Public Schools' FAQs:

No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is a federal law designed to increase educational accountability and improving education. The law sets up a system of increasingly difficult-to-meet goals, by which all children will be proficient in core academic subjects, culminating in 2014. Moving toward those goals, each school is required to annually demonstrate that it is making Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) toward their attainment, not only for all students collectively, but also by various subgroups (i.e., gender, race, special education.) For those districts or schools that fail to meet their AYP goals, the law provides for various sanctions including potential loss of certain funding, required tutoring or other assistance for affected students, or the right of parents at schools that do not meet improvement goals to move their children to other schools within the district with transportation provided by the district. MCAS assessments are the tools used to monitor AYP. The school districts must align their district curriculum to curriculum frameworks for each grade promulgated by the state. Then, students in grades 3 through 10 are tested on the subjects and topics in the state frameworks. The results are reported by grade-level and subject. The state assesses how districts, individual schools, and sub-groups of students at individual schools perform in the required subjects. The failure of a district, school, or sub-group of students to make required progress can lead to the sanctions. Thus, some of the costs of this assessment system involve curriculum updates and implementation in line with the state frameworks, teacher training on the required curriculum, and supports for students who need assistance with the testing. Finally, the testing itself must conform to very specific rules of implementation requiring oversight. And, teachers and administrators must spend time analyzing the results to identify required curriculum changes or other measures to improve performance. When the NCLB was enacted, the federal government promised billions of dollars in related funding for its support. However, much of this funding has not materialized. NCLB has created a climate of ever-increasing expectations and has resulted in increased funding requirements, all in an environment of decreasing revenues. As a result, the schools are forced to look to local taxpayers to provide the funding necessary for its schools to continually achieve AYP. Accordingly, it would be fair to characterize the NCLB as another unfunded, or inadequately funded, mandate.