In a story in today’s New York Times, Sam Dillon reports that states are failing to comply with the federal No Child Left Behind Act—and the U.S. Department of Education may, at long last, start levying fines. That could be very good news for poor children.

Dillon reports that no states met the deadline for the federal requirement that all teachers be “highly qualified,” and only ten states received full approval for their testing systems. More significantly, the article notes that Education Department Secretary Margaret Spellings has written to states warning of “unacceptably low” participation in the law’s student transfer program—a key part of the act that requires that students in failing schools be given the right to transfer to better performing public schools.

No Child Left Behind is a mixed bag—some provisions make sense, others do not—but the student transfer provisions are extremely important and have the potential genuinely to improve the education of low-income students. Research has long found that schools with concentrations of poverty are marked by inadequate funding, under-qualified teachers, negative peer influences, discipline problems, low levels of parental involvement, low expectations, and so on. Middle-class schools are twenty-two times more likely to be persistently high performing that high-poverty schools. Rather than simply trying to make separate schools for rich and poor work, the student transfer provision of No Child Left Behind effectively is supposed to require school districts to let poor kids transfer to better, middle class, public schools.

Allowing poor kids to attend mixed-income public schools has raised achievement in places such as Wake County, North Carolina. But many districts have been lax in facilitating transfers—or have actively discouraged transfers—and only 1 percent of those eligible to move to a better school actually do so. In Los Angeles Unified School District, for example, only 500 of 250,000 eligible students transferred to a better public school in the 2005–06 academic year. Spellings is now warning California that the federal government might withhold some of the state’s $700 million in federal funding if it cannot provide adequate documentation about the transfer programs in the state’s twenty largest districts.

In the long term, to boost the low number of student transfers, the No Child Left Behind Act should be amended to provide financial incentives to encourage high performing schools to recruit low-income transfer students, to require cross-district public school choice where there is not enough space to transfer within districts, and to increase funding for magnet schools in urban areas. But until the No Child Left Behind Act is reauthorized, the news that Spellings plans at least to enforce the existing law is welcome.

Richard D. Kahlenberg is Education Fellow at The Century Foundation.