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One of the biggest failures of President Bush’s No Child Left Behind act is its heavy reliance on standardized tests.  Studies have shown that while standardized testing may be a step forward in regularizing education, it oftentimes shoves lower-performing students—and entire school systems—further into despair.

In an eye-opening report from eSchool News, grades K – 12 still haven’t grasped the crucial nature of personalized technology assessment programs to individually foster a child’s education.  Without these technologies, children may find themselves struggling to keep up with classmates and overwhelmed and unprepared for postsecondary education.

Tailored and adaptive educational technology can pinpoint deficiencies in a student’s learning and work to strengthen weak areas.  If struggling students must rely on standardized tests, they risk the possibility of failure, devastation of the self-esteem, a lowering of the school’s NCLB scores—and, ultimately, the amount of funding President Bush’s program wants to dish out to difficult schools.

The good news is that huge strides have been made in the arena of wide-reaching Internet access and security tools to protect student data, applications and documents.

In the meantime, educational publishers are working hard to create these materials to distribute to schools.  The marketplace is booming with technology.  Publishers are less reliant on traditional manufacturing plants, all in an effort to broaden the eBook phenomenon.  Facebook, Amazon’s Kindle, the iPhone and various other personal technologies all make their way into corporate consideration.  But if public schools cannot afford these tools, or are not made aware of them, the nightmare that which is NCLB may continue unabated.