The federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001 (the latest revision of ESEA) has exerted strong pressure on the states to encourage local public schools to improve their standardized test scores. This emphasis reflects a desire on the part of politicians and policy makers for strict accountability in the form of current test scores that can be used to determine the comparative status of all schools. But NCLB reduces school health to a single criterion--whether a school makes AYP (adequate yearly progress), as reflected in its test scores. AYP is an inept magic bullet. It has little to do with school improvement and, regrettably, nothing to do with helping individual students to learn. Today, school improvement is narrowly defined in terms of raising students' test scores. In this article, the authors look back to an era when educators examined every dimension of schooling to see how it could be made more effective in advancing student learning.