George Bush arrived in Chicago today to celebrate the sixth anniversary of No Child Left Behind.

The Chicago Sun-Times in their editorial welcomed the President with this analysis of his landmark domestic failure:

It has been six years since Bush signed the landmark No Child bill. Efforts to reauthorize it stalled last year, and he will likely be talking the law up today, touting its accomplishments.

He’ll find little to brag about in Chicago high school test scores.

Since the No Child law passed, average state test scores for high schoolers haven’t budged. In fact, reading scores for minority students and for poor students are lower than in 2003, a Sun-Times analysis found. There has been meaningful progress on the ACT since 2003, but white student gains outpaced gains made by black and Hispanic students.

Those numbers won’t improve, many in Chicago’s trenches say, unless the law is changed to address what stands in the way: inequitable funding, overcrowding, violence, truancy and the overwhelming effects of poverty.

“If they’re not willing to take these problems seriously … then NCLB is a waste of time,” said Andrew Martinek, a teacher at Gage Park High School, which saw a spike in violence after it absorbed a record number of freshmen in 2006. “They’re trying to force innovation without the tools.”