As a piece of rhetoric, No Child Left Behind might be effective. As policy, however, I have my (many) doubts. For one thing it is not clear to me that failure, by itself, is a bad thing. As Thomas Sowell pointed out once, we all drop out of school at some point. The efficient level of output of bads is generally not zero and some failure is optimal.

An interesting paper on No Child Left Behind is "Can No Child Left Behind Close the Gaps in Pass Rates on Standardized Tests?" in the January 2006 issue of Contemporary Economic Policy. The authors, Claus Hoerandner (an undergraduate!) and Robert Lemke, decompse the effects of student achievement into controllable (manipulable through policy) and uncontrollable factors. They find that most of the gap in passage rates between schools is due to uncontrollable factors and thus NCLB should not be expected to close achievement gaps. The really cool thing about the paper is that they calculate elasticities for each of the variables with respect to pass rates. For example, they find that the elasticity of pass rates with respect to local tax revenue is inelastic (0.597).