Opting Out of No Child Left Behind : Now Arizona must get its own house in order by Matthew Ladner, Ph.D. It looks like Arizona is set to opt out of No Child Left Behind. Arizonans need transparency and accountability in public schooling, but they do not need NCLB. The Goldwater Institute has written extensively about the flaws of NCLB. Chief among them is the fact that NCLB creates an entirely perverse incentive for states to lower their academic standards in order to meet a federal goal of 100 percent proficiency by 2014. A recent University of California Berkley study...