God bless Vermont

You really have to admire Vermont: when the federal government says, "We want to give you flexiblity as we approach 2014 under NCLB," Vermont actually takes them at their word:

They wanted to move away from what they saw as the “shaming tactics” of the federal law, which labeled schools as failures if they didn’t make adequate yearly progress toward the law’s gradually increasing performance targets. And they wanted to de-emphasize standardized tests by only giving them every other year.
“This was really stepping out of the box,” says John Fischer, Vermont’s Deputy Commissioner of Transformation and Innovation.
Vermont officials spent months developing their application last fall and winter.

So, those who work for Secretary Duncan get the preliminary application, and...?

 But soon after submitting a draft to the Education Department in February they learned they’d have to make a significant change: The Education Department would not let them give up on mandatory annual testing. “That was further than the flexibility they were willing to go,” says Fischer, who oversaw the state’s application.Vermont scrambled to revise its plan, but when the Department raised further concerns about the plan’s academic standards, means of holding schools accountable and plans for turning around struggling schools, the state ultimately decided in May to scrap its application. “When we got down to it,” Fischer says, “there weren’t a lot of benefits.”

So much for flexibility, folks.
Worth reading the entire article, which you can find here.