Amazingly, I haven’t seen posts about yesterday’s USA Today article reporting that the US Department of Education has told 36 of 50 states that their graduation tests did not meet DoE standards. If schools do not fix the problem next year, they stand to lose their administrative federal funding.

But buried in the article was the information that Nebraska had their entire system rejected:

Nebraska and Maine, the states most at odds with the department, face the maximum fine — a one-fourth cut.

Nebraska’s education commissioner, Doug Christensen, said the federal decision blind-sided him and violated a past agreement.

"I cannot recall a professional issue in my over 40 years as an educator over which I have been so disappointed," Christensen told Nebraska reporters on Wednesday.

I’ve written about Nebraska’s STARS program before, and I had the opportunity to talk to Commissioner Christensen a few years ago. He spent several hours with me talking to me about how much work they had put into making the program work. I hope he can absorb the federal cut and therefore continue doing what he’s doing. I can only imagine the anger and frustration in Nebraska’s education community today.

And of course, the work up in Maine with the laptop program is, along with the STARS program, one of the most interesting state-wide initiatives in education today.

Does the Department of Education really want people to connect these dots — that the two states doing some of the most interesting and innovative work in education today — one of which was even around assessment — had their programs rejected under NCLB? Does that say more about NCLB and the values behind the law than it does about the state programs?