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The new "No Child Left Behind" rules may force some states to rework their policies to make it easier for schools to getting passing grades and may prompt some smaller schools to forego getting federal funds as a way to avoid the maze of federal requirements, sources in the education community said.

Many state and local education officials spent the Thanksgiving weekend reviewing the nearly 400-page rule that the Department of Education released Nov. 26. The final rule appears in the Dec. 2 Federal Register.

"If states follow the strict letter of the law, every school in the country will be considered `low-performing' within five years," according to Bruce Hunter, director of public policy for the American Association of School Administrators.

The reason many schools won't make the grade is because under No Child Left Behind, schools must show students in several categories are making steady academic improvement. These include race/ethnicity, English proficiency, disability, economic background, gender and migrant status.

Under No Child Left Behind, a school will be considered poor performing if it misses meeting its goal for even one of those subgroups.

"It guarantees that schools that receive Title I funds will get sanctions within five years" for failing to live up to No Child Left Behind, Monty Neill, executive director of FairTest, an advocacy organization in Cambridge, Mass., that aims to end what it sees as the abuses and flaws of standardized testing.

Some 90 percent of school districts in the United States receive federal funds under Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Act (ESEA), the law that No Child Left Behind overhauled. Title I is the section intended to help improve education for poor children and the provision specifically addressed in the regulations published this week.

"We had hoped to see more signals of flexibility" in the final regulations, Patricia Sullivan, deputy executive director for advocacy and strategic partnerships for the Council of Chief State School Officers, said. The administration had said states could build on their existing systems, she said, "But the regulations say: no flexibility."

David Shreve of the National Conference of State Legislatures said the law, and now the regulations, cast a net so wide and the requirements are so stringent that some 70 percent of all schools will be considered failing.

"The American public won't accept that 70 percent to 80 percent of our schools are failing," he said.

Those schools deemed to be failing will have to allow students to transfer to other schools and pay for their transportation to get there. The rules make clear that better schools can no longer use overcrowding as an excuse not to accept students from failing schools. Schools in Baltimore, Chicago, Los Angeles, Memphis, New York did just that earlier this year.

Critics of the No Child Left Behind law say the Bush administration purposely made the law and regulations so strict as a way to promote vouchers.

"Our biggest concern is the [final regulation's] emphasis on school choice," Liz Wolff of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, an activist group, said. The emphasis should be on improving existing schools and getting more qualified teachers into classrooms, she said.

Neil of FairTest and Hunter of AASA both look for smaller, suburban schools that don't receive a lot of Title I funds to think about skipping federal Title I funds as a way to avoid the No Child Left Behind sanctions. These schools would still have to make sure their students make adequate yearly progress.

States also will look again at tweaking definitions and standards to make it easier for students to reach "proficiency." Some states -- Connecticut, Colorado and Louisiana and Michigan lowered their standards in the last year and more are likely to consider it.

Many states also will be hard-pressed to meet the Jan. 31, '03, deadline for filing annual reports with the federal government detailing how states will measure student progress each year over the next 12 years. Education officials argue that the federal Department of Education offered little guidance on how to create these accountability plans and now the department is springing final regulations that go into effect in early 03.

Another complication is that some state education departments may want or have to go back to the state legislatures to make changes to their policies, Kathy Christie, vice president of information clearinghouse for the Education Commission of the States said. Many legislatures do not come back before January, giving states less than a month to fine-tune their reports.

The Department of Education is standing firm with the new regulations. "Only if we hold schools and school districts accountable for the improved achievement of all students will we meet the goal of leaving no child behind and ensure that every child learns, every school has the opportunity to improve and every dollar is spent wisely for those purposes," U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige said when the regulations were released.