thank you for bringing that up. i had totally forgotten the unfunded mandate aspect of it. it drains a lot of much needed $$ from states education budgets.
I would like to add to the conversation that the problem with programs like this is that there are always a work around or short cut to address the issue. I have a friend that works at my sons school and he told me this is the case. I don't remember how they did it exactly but they fudged their numbers to make the overall score higher for the school than it should've been!
In the school my wife taught at last year, she taught 2nd grade (LEAP is 4th grade). She was instructed by her principal to not teach Social Studies or Science in class time, to focus on reading and math (LEAP subjects at the time). Some schools do some really bad things all for the sake of raising test scores.
