Human abilities are distributed along a bell curve. Therefore, excellence and equality are mutually exclusive.
No amount of testing, curriculum tweaking, or funding redistribution will have any effect whatsoever on this.
NCLB amounts to the largest expansion yet of the strategy of directing more resources towards the students making up the lower end of the curve. This isn't a new idea, and there's no reason to believe it will be any more effective on a national scale than it has been in repeated district and county level attempts.
Special education programs make up one quarter of all public K-12 education expenditures.
The bottom one fourth of public special education students (about 1.35 million students, out of 49 million total) absorb close to 40 billion dollars a year. For this staggering investment, as a group they don't even come close to meeting the low state standards, let alone excellence.
Imagine what the top 1.35 million students would accomplish with that same 30,000 dollars a year of personalized instruction.
The results would be staggering.