It's going to get weird out there

So while we're all worrying about level 4 status and AYP and MCAS scores, back in Washington, let's remember, they're still trying to figure out how to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Elementary Act (aka: NCLB) before the clock strikes midnight, it's 2014, and nearly every school is underperforming because no school has 100% proficiency. And remember, the NEW whatever-we-want-to-call-it is going to involved the new common assessments, which may or may not look anything like what we have now.
Cue Kansas.
According to Ed Week:

Kansas has applied to the U.S. Department of Education for permission to hold its testing targets at 2009-10 levels until 2014-15, the year the common assessments are supposed to be up and running...

One district in Kansas, McPherson, actually has won a rather unusual testing waiver from the U.S. Department of Education, we are hearing today. The waiver lets the district dump state tests in grades 6-12 for federal accountability purposes, replacing them with the ACT's series

That's a major waiver, there.
It would do us all some good to realize that everything is going to get tossed up in the air in the next few years. We're running up against the edge on AYP, so more and more schools aren't going to make it. We're looking at an assessment system on its way out. We're bringing in new standards and new assessments, which, be warned, are going to throw test scores into major turmoil for a number of years.
And that's just based on what we do know. Who knows what the reauthorized federal law is going to look like?