The No Child Left Behind Act was an attempt to bring the glory of the Free Market to education, with schools competing for resources and having funding cut if they didn't pass the tests.
Actually, I had a different take on it. In the mid-80's, through Bill Moyers on PBS I became aware of the Christian Reconstructionist movement (see also "Democracy as Heresy". Christianity Today 31 (3), 20 February 1987, pp. 17—23) and I have kept a wary eye open since then. Around the mid-90's, our church's magazine printed an article/interview with former fundamentalist minister Skipp Porteous, a private investigator who regularly infiltrated and reported on Religious Right conventions and meetings. In that article, he presented documents showing that one of the Religious Right's goals was to destroy the public school system and replace it with Christian schools -- they had a 5-year plan which obviously didn't work -- and that school vouchers were presented to Christian Coalition followers as being a key tool towards that goal.
So when Bush unveiled his plan, I didn't see it as being the Free Market to education, but rather I saw it as an under-handed attempt to destroy public education. Punishing under-performing schools with starvation of funding is counter-productive to improving the system; it is exactly what you would want to do in order to destroy the system.
My younger son was in high school when that went into effect. And, yes, his big complaint was that the teachers had to spend most of the time teaching to the tests, which left them practically no time to learn anything. At the time I was also on talk.origins newsgroup and one member reported that his daughter's school was punished by NCLB because, unlike the other schools in the area, they provided special education programs those special ed kids' scores had brought the school's overall scores down. "No Child Left Behind"? Bullshit!