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During Tuesday night’s State of the Union address, President Bush urged Congress to pass medical liability reform. Like the president, Governor Craig Benson has called for medical lawsuit reforms in New Hampshire. The governor is joined by doctors and leading Republicans who say a proposed state law will cut medical insurance bills.
Lawyers emphatically disagree.
N-H-P-R Correspondent John Milne has the story.

The nation’s new education law, No Child Left Behind, passed with strong bipartisan support a year ago. Senators with ideologies as different as Massachusetts Democrat Ted Kennedy and New Hampshire Republican Judd Gregg joined forces to bring more testing, ambitious teaching goals, and more money to the nation’s schools.

But since then, that bipartisan spirit has evaporated and the chief reason is – the money. Democrats say the law is under-funded. Republicans argue that the increases have been more than generous.

Here in New Hampshire, concern over the law’s fiscal consequences has drawn strong reactions from towns, state lawmakers, and educators. It has also drawn a vigorous defense from No Child Left Behind’s chief Republican sponsor, Senator Gregg.

In the last part of our series on the new education law, NHPR’s Jon Greenberg outlines the debate over money and No Child Left Behind.

Ever since the No Child Left Behind legislation passed, New Hampshire educators have been thinking about tests.

A few years from now, No Child Left Behind, or NCLB, will require students to take a test every year from 3rd through 8th grade in math and language arts.

Those test results will determine whether a school is doing fine, or must offer additional tutoring to students, reorganize its curriculum, or in a worst-case scenario fire all of its teachers.

With such high stakes, a significant issue has emerged- whether the test should measure how much students know at a certain point, or how much they?ve learned since the beginning of the year. In the third part of our series on No Child Left Behind, NHPR?s Dan Gorenstein reports on a new wrinkle in the debate over testing.

Schools around New Hampshire are scrambling to prepare for a brand new set of federal rules. The “No Child Left Behind Act” offers schools new money but it also requires a host of changes, including a steady rise in student test scores. Teachers and administrators are still trying to figure out exactly what the law will do. But as they look at it, some are skeptical of the government’s motives. In the second of our series of reports on “No Child Left Behind”, NHPR’s Trish Anderton looks at the philosophy behind the law.

New Hampshire has begun the hard work of responding to the sweeping federal educational law known as No Child Left Behind. President George W. Bush recently judged the bi-partisan measure “the most meaningful educational reform probably ever.” Proponents of the bill, including lead sponsor NH Senator Judd Gregg, have mounted an all out push to make good on the President’s words. At the same time, skepticism from politicians on both sides of the aisle has brought an element of political risk to the goal of making our schools better. In our first report in a four-part series, NHPR’s Josh Rogers looks at the politics of No Child Left Behind.