It's very possible to achieve with a majority of kids. The mandate is to do this with "all" kids (ie, concentrate on getting the lowest-performing children of crackheads meeting standards). It's called egalitarianism, the desire for everybody (except the elites, of course) to be "equal". But of course, there are some percentage who are not interested, so the game turns into dumbing down the education of the smarter kids so as to minimise the disparity that way.
"No child left behind" is an attempt to raise the bar for all students. We'll see if it works or not.
You can count on the systems at the bottom (and the parents of the students at the bottom) to squawk the loudest, even though they are the ones who need help the most.