For Connecticut's attorney general, Richard Blumenthal, filing a lawsuit against the No Child Left Behind Act must have seemed like an obvious winner. More and more attorney generals around the country were using splashy litigation to boost their profiles. (It was August 2005, and Eliot Spitzer was a lock for the governor's mansion in neighboring New York.) By taking on the increasingly unpopular Bush administration and demanding more federal funding for education, headlines and support from fellow Democrats were sure to follow. "Give us the money," Blumenthal demanded at a press conference, or relieve the state from having to test elementary school students once a year in reading and math. And for a few months after the suit was filed, it seemed to work. The National Education Association (NEA), the nation's largest teachers' union, issued a laudatory press release. "Connecticut is taking a brave stand today," said the NEA's president, Reg Weaver. So far, so good.

But things soon started to go south. In November, a federal judge threw out a similar NEA-backed suit in Michigan. Then came the real blow: On January 30, 2006, the Connecticut chapter of the NAACP announced plans to intervene in the suit, representing a group of minority schoolchildren against Blumenthal. Noting that Connecticut had "the worst gap in achievement between poor and non-poor children" in the nation, the NAACP called the suit "an excuse to not meet the needs of Connecticut's children of color." National civil-rights leaders soon joined the chorus. Legendary attorney William Taylor, chair of the Citizens' Commission on Civil Rights, a man who worked with Thurgood Marshall on the 1958 Little Rock Central High School brief to the Supreme Court, dismissed Blumenthal as an opponent of civil rights. One legal observer in Connecticut called the action a "special fiasco," while the Hartford Courant and The Washington Post...

Read the entire article in the August 18, 2008 issue of The American Prospect.