There’s definitely a “Seeing Like A State” point on legibility here. NCLB tries to make the performance of disparate state/county education systems more legible to the federal government, so that it can apply carrots and sticks to “improve” (for some definition of the word) performance.

By simplifying the problem to performance at this curriculum, you gain the ability to measure, but also corrupt the thing you are trying to measure, by forcing schools to teach to the test instead of teaching better (where there are direct tradeoffs between the two).

I think NCLB fails to recognize that education is something which benefits from local expertise, which means you need to fund teachers/schools and get out of the way, rather than try to standardize it. I recognize this is very hard politically.

We are failing to teach those basic skills not because of bad schools, but because of bad home environments (food, safety, etc)

Or maybe it's both? There's research showing that students can do a lot better when they're randomly assigned to a higher-quality school.

You’re making this statement with way more confidence than the data supports. Both are significant.

What are those “basic skills”?

I'd venture a guess that they're talking about the "three R's": reading, 'riting, and 'rithmetic.

AFAIK NCLB is concerned with far more stuff than those three R’s.

And anyway one should wonder just how much tinkering with school system can push you forward, at some point you should realize that education is not only dependent on the school environment.