A $3.5 million grant from the federal government will help transform a handful of states into showcase examples of how state education departments should operate to meet the tough new demands of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB).

The money is being given to the Education Leaders Council (ELC), a network of educational leaders working to advance school reform efforts. In turn, ELC will help train state and local school leaders how to track, analyze, and report student test-score data and other information to improve instruction.

Several states—including Kentucky, Massachusetts, and Indiana—have publicly declared that the requirements of NCLB are virtually impossible to implement.

The law asks schools to do several new things starting this September, including testing students every year in grades three through eight, showing adequate yearly progress (AYP), reporting more detailed data—and, of course, they can't leave a single child behind.

"You were sort of able to bury your low-performing students in your average before," said Brian Jones, vice president for communications and policy at ELC. But schools can't do this anymore, he said. Not even special-education students are exempt from the law's requirements.

Furthermore, the extra testing is going to produce more data than schools are used to seeing, Jones said. Analyzing this data is essential to helping schools meet their AYP goals, but most teachers and administrators are not skilled at data analysis.

If schools fail to meet these requirements, they risk losing federal funding. "There are definite penalties now that didn't exist before," Jones said.

Consequently, many school leaders across the country are feeling overwhelmed by the new demands and frustrated by what they perceive as a lack of guidance from the U.S. Department of Education (ED). But this initiative, called Following the Leaders, aims to show state and school education leaders that meeting the new requirements is possible.

"Seeing is believing," U.S. Education Secretary Rod Paige said. "This project will show our whole nation what is possible when the essential elements of reform are put in place."

Through the initiative, participating states will receive assistance with how to report student data according to the new requirements and how to analyze the data to meet the required adequate yearly progress.

"It's an empowerment thing. It's giving them the tools they need," Jones said.

ELC will help answer questions such as: How do you crunch information? How do you make intelligent and informed decisions? What do you need to do to meet the standards?

"There's so much stuff that schools have to do right now—a lot has to do with reporting data," Jones said. "AYP is still the absolute largest thing schools are struggling with."