This speech addresses the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) and educators' and policymakers' reactions to it. The talk focuses on three ways people are responding to the Act. Some, according to the speaker, consider the law to be malevolent and a conspiracy by the Bush Administration to start handing education over to private corporations. This camp suggests that NCLB seeks to undermine education because it does not provide adequate funding to support all the changes the act requires. Others respond to NCLB by worrying about compliance. State departments of education staff, central-office staff of local school districts, and local administrators are spending a lot of time, according to the speaker, trying to figure out exactly what the law means and how to implement it. The third way people are responding to NCLB is largely hypothetical as of yet. The speaker suggests that educators should seize NCLB as an opportunity for creativity, not in implementing the law, but in using it to improve teacher quality and to enable all students to become academically proficient. (WFA)