From Tom Vander Ark, a Bill Gates guy, writing in the Huffington Post:

The primary reason we have a federal law like NCLB is that school boards (and state boards) allowed generations of chronic failure. They cut bad employment deals and asked for more money when things didn't go well. Teachers that could went to the suburbs. Most low income and minority kids were getting left behind. Anyone committed to equity could see things had to change ...

There were a bunch of technical problems with the bill in 2001 and they never got fixed. But the biggest problem is that 8 years later states and school boards have continued to allow chronic failure--they basically ignored the federal demands to intervene. Don't get me wrong, none of this is easy; employment contracts are hard to change and the most difficult thing for a leadership group to do is close a struggling school. But our public delivery system is systematically cheating low income and minority students and just throwing out standards and testing will only make things less equitable.