There is no end to the complaints leveled at the Bush Administrations education policy, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). Now, Tennessee and North Carolina will be given an opportunity to prove if they really do know what is best for their students.

According to an article published Wednesday, May 18 on the CNN.com web site, “the two states may track how individual students perform in math and reading over time, known as a ‘growth model.’ Until now, states could only measure success or failure by comparing the scores of different groups of children from one year to the next. Many educators say that system is unfair because it does not recognize changes in the population or improvement by individual students.”

Of the 13 states that sought approval to track individual students over time, only two were approved. Spellings had planned to allow up to 10 states in the pilot project this year, but other states didn’t qualify, mainly because they lacked sufficient data.

“We set a high bar, admittedly, because we really wanted to get good information,” said Henry Johnson, the assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education. “I certainly would have liked to have had more.”

States with the required data that didn’t make the cut were Alaska, Arkansas, Arizona, Delaware, Florida and Oregon.