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By 2014, nearly all of California's K-12 schools are likely to be labeled as "failing" under the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. For those receiving Title I funds for low-income students, chances are they'll be facing serious sanctions - conversion to charter status, takeover by a for-profit company or complete closure. "It's absolutely absurd that the federal government has instituted such a punitive and degrading system of school evaluation," says Southwest High School biology teacher Steve Wavra, shown here with students Lee Elliott and Phillip Pouvave. Even though the Bush administration has agreed to some changes in the NCLB law, the fact that they're not retroactive means good schools like Southwest will remain at a disadvantage. Instead of being a tool to help "fix" public schools as it was originally touted, it's now obvious that the federal law sets up schools to fail. NCLB, in fact, includes 37 different ways in which a school can miss the mark. Schools considered good on every other standard of measurement are being branded as failing. Already, 36 percent of the state's schools have been put on the list of schools failing to make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) this year. The number is expected to rise exponentially as the percentage of students required to score "proficient" ratchets up to 100 percent. As of this summer, approximately 1,200 Title I schools in California had been enrolled in Program Improvement (PI) as a precursor to more severe sanctions. [more]