Hope that it might finally narrow the racial achievement gap.

And fear that, by focusing parents' attention on test scores, it could cause segregation in the nation's schools to deepen.

The law sets an ambitious goal: All children will be proficient in math, reading and science by 2014. Schools that do not improve enough each year must give up some federal funds for tutoring or allow students to transfer to better schools.

U.S. Education Secretary Paige describes No Child Left Behind as "the logical extension" of Brown. Christopher Edley, cofounder of the Harvard Civil Rights Project, calls it "a civil rights statute."

Because of No Child, Edley said, the long legacy of educational inequity is being shoved between the nation's eyes, with Washington's demand that something be done about it.

Critics complain that although the law allows children in failing schools to transfer to better ones, they are largely limited to their own usually troubled districts. And even Edley is among those who say that No Child doesn't provide enough money to help districts with many disadvantaged students meet the challenge - one measured by tests.

"The focus on scores has the potential to resegregate," said Amy Stuart Wells, a professor at Teachers' College in New York.

Wells studied 600 graduates of the Class of 1980 at six desegregated high schools throughout the country. Most told her the diversity had been good for them.

Yet now, when it comes to placing their own children in schools, three-quarters of the whites choose majority-white schools. Many said they would prefer better-integrated schools but cannot find any in which the scores are as high.

"There used to be less pressure to have your kids in high-achieving schools," Wells said, "and if you chose diversity over test scores, you weren't dooming them."

Schools must be accountable, she said, but "when we say we want good schools, we need to think about that in a more complex way. We want kids to do well on . We also want them to get along in a society where people don't look like each other."

Contact staff writer Dale Mezzacappa at 215-854-5112 or dmezzacappa@phillynews.com.

Staff writers Diane Mastrull and Anthony R. Wood contributed to this article.

The Brown Case

Oliver L. Brown et.al. v. the Board of Education of Topeka was an amalgam of five segregation cases from Kansas, Delaware, South Carolina, Virginia and Washington, D.C., combined by the U.S. Supreme Court under the name of one plaintiff.

A Topeka, Kan., parent, Brown had to send his daughter to an all-black elementary school two miles from home. The city had 18 neighborhood schools for whites and four for African Americans, permissible under an 1879 Kansas law.

In 1950, the Topeka NAACP gathered a group of 13 black parents to try to enroll their 20 children in the white schools nearest their homes. All were turned away. A class-action lawsuit was filed on their behalf in U.S. District Court, which ruled against them.

The Brown case was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court and argued by Thurgood Marshall, of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, in December 1952.