While schools and states complain about No Child Left Behind (and I'll admit, there are serious shortcomings with the law), they manipulate loopholes all the time. The latest example of this comes from Alabama.

Without the help of at least one provision of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, only 11 of Mobile County's public schools would have met state performance standards this year, instead of the 73 that did, according to a Press-Register analysis.

[snip]

One provision in particular "did help quite a lot of schools," said Gloria Turner, who coordinates testing for the Alabama Department of Education. That was a formula used by Alabama and other states giving schools a half-credit for each student who failed to pass a required standardized test, yet came close.

[snip]

State officials have said that schools should get credit for students who are almost where they need to be academically. But critics have insisted that this may create an illusion that schools are doing better than they really are.

For example, 60 percent of Alabama's seventh-graders passed the math portion of the test in 2006. But because the remaining 40 percent scored in the category considered as partially passing, Alabama earned an overall passage rate of 80 percent.

Opponents of giving parents more control over where their children attend school sometimes points to glowing reports of improvements: See, we don't need those radical reforms. Test scores are up!