The San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) is one of eight California districts that have been granted a federal waiver from No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the disastrous federal education policy we’ve been suffering under since the George Bush presidency. Joined together in an umbrella organization called the California Office to Reform Education (CORE), Fresno, Long Beach, Los Angeles, Oakland, Sacramento City, San Francisco, Santa Ana, and Sanger unified school districts now no longer have to meet the impossible requirement that 100% of their students are proficient in reading and math by 2014. While the goal of ensuring that all students are achieving the most they can should of course the absolute focus of our public education system, the reality is that there are too many factors at play to achieve perfection. That oh-so-appealing 100% target is really little more than a cover for the lack of attention to the varied needs of actual students. Our children’s gifts and challenges require schools much more rigorous, rich and nuanced than NCLB’s focus on achieving statistically significant sets of test scores as opposed to transformative educational experiences.

Given the failure over the last several years to replace NCLB with a more meaningful policy, the Department of Education has turned to the granting of waivers at the state level as a strategy to reduce the carnage and political