The Obama administration said Friday that two more states, Washington and Wisconsin, will be exempted from many requirements of the federal "No Child Left Behind" education law. 
 
 The decision brings to 26 the number of states granted waivers as Congress remains at a stalemate regarding an overhaul to former President George W. Bush's signature accomplishment. With more than half of the states now free from many of the law's requirements, there are questions about the future of No Child Left Behind. 
 
 The 10-year-old federal No Child Left Behind law requires all students to achieve proficient math and reading scores by 2014, a goal that many educators say is impossible. 
 
 The Education Department began granting the waivers in February in exchange for promises from states to improve how they prepare and evaluate students. The executive action by Obama is part of an ongoing effort to act on his own when Congress is rebuffing him. 
 
 The administration says the waivers are a temporary measure while Education Secretary Arne Duncan continues to work with Congress to rewrite the law, which is formally known as the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. 
 
 "A strong, bipartisan reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act remains the best path forward in education reform, but as 26 states have now demonstrated, our kids can't wait any longer for Congress to act," Duncan said in a statement released Friday. 
 
 The 10-year-old federal No Child Left Behind law requires all students to achieve proficient math and reading scores by 2014, a goal that many educators say is impossible. 
 
 Members of both parties agree the No Child Left Behind law is broken but have been unable to agree on how to fix it. While it has been praised for focusing on the performance of minorities, low-income students, English language learners and special education students, it has also led to a number of schools being labeled as "failing." 
 
 Critics also say the law has had the unintended effect of encouraging instructors to teach to the test and has led schools to narrow their curricula. 
 
 Washington state schools chief Randy Dorn said the waiver will lift the requirement that all students pass both the state reading and math tests by 2014. It will also give Washington school districts more flexibility about how they spend some federal dollars. 
 
 In return, Washington will need to show improvement in test scores for subgroups of students who have historically had lower scores than average, such as those who qualify for free- or reduced-price meals. 
 
 In late May, Wisconsin officials said they were modifying some details of their waiver application and expected approval soon. 
 
 The federal Education Department earlier wrote to officials in that state, saying Wisconsin had a number of commendable proposals, but they were too short on detail. 
 
 Other waiver applications are still pending in 10 states and the District of Columbia. Six waivers were approved last month in Arkansas, Iowa, Missouri, South Dakota, Utah and Virginia. 
 
 In order to get a waiver, each state had to promise to show in other ways that its students and schools are improving, and they were required to more closely link teacher evaluations to student test scores, among other requirements. 
 
 Washington's waiver application emphasized its embrace of new national education standards, the state's new teacher and principal evaluations, and its efforts to take a broader look at student achievement beyond reading and math by also testing for writing and science. 
 
 The waiver agreement requires that by 2018, Washington cut in half achievement gaps between various ethnic and economic groups, when compared with 100 percent passage rates. For example, if one group had 74 percent passing reading in 2011, that group would need to have 87 percent passing by 2018. 
 
 The agreement adds another requirement for Title I schools, which are high-poverty public schools that get extra money from the federal government to help students who are behind academically or at risk of falling behind. 
 
 It requires the state education office to annually identify priority schools, which are the 5 percent lowest-achieving of Title I schools; focus schools, which are the lowest 10 percent of Title I schools; and reward schools, the highest performing Title I schools or those making the most progress in a given year. 
 
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 Contact Donna Blankinship through Twitter at https://twitter.com/dgblankinship. ||||| In just five months, the Obama administration has freed schools in more than half the nation from central provisions of the No Child Left Behind education law, raising the question of whether the decade-old federal program has been essentially nullified. 
 
 On Friday, the Department of Education plans to announce that it has granted waivers releasing two more states, Washington and Wisconsin, from some of the most onerous conditions of the signature Bush-era legislation. With this latest round, 26 states are now relieved from meeting the lofty — and controversial — goal of making all students proficient in reading and mathematics by 2014. Additional waivers are pending in 10 states and the District of Columbia. 
 
 “The more waivers there are, the less there really is a law, right?” said Andy Porter, dean of the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education. 
 
 While No Child Left Behind has been praised for forcing schools to become more accountable for the education of poor and minority children, it has been derided for what some regard as an obsessive focus on test results, which has led to some notorious cheating scandals. Critics have also faulted the law’s system of rating schools, which they say labeled so many of them low performing that it rendered the judgment meaningless. 
 
 In exchange for the education waivers, schools and districts must promise to set new targets aimed at preparing students for colleges and careers. They must also tether evaluations of teachers and schools in part to student achievement on standardized tests. The use of tests to judge teacher effectiveness is a departure from No Child Left Behind, which used test scores to rate schools and districts. 
 
 Congress has tried and failed repeatedly to reauthorize the education law over the past five years because Democrats and Republicans cannot agree on an appropriate role for the federal government in education. And so, in the heat of an election year, the Obama administration has maneuvered around Congress, using the waivers to advance its own education agenda. 
 
 The waivers appear to follow an increasingly deliberate pattern by the administration to circumvent lawmakers, as it did last month when it granted hundreds of thousands of young illegal immigrants a reprieve from deportation. The administration has also unveiled policies to prevent drug shortages, raise fuel economy standards and cut refinancing fees for federally insured mortgages. 
 
 Critics question whether the waivers have done much to genuinely shift the focus of federal education reform, given their continued reliance on standardized tests. The waivers “should probably make the meh list,” said Joshua Starr, superintendent of the Montgomery County schools in Maryland, which was granted a waiver in May. 
 
 Mr. Starr said he believed that education reform should focus on incentives to help teachers collaborate and help students learn skills that could not simply be measured by tests. 
 
 “It is another example to me of how we’re not focused on the right things in the American education conversation today,” Mr. Starr said. “I have a lot of respect for Arne Duncan,” he added, referring to the secretary of education, “but it’s just sort of moving around the chairs on the Titanic.” 
 
 Mr. Duncan, in a telephone interview on Thursday, said states that had received waivers, including New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, would also use a mix of other indicators to evaluate teachers and schools, like how many students actually enrolled in college or took Advanced Placement exams, as well as reviews of teachers by their peers, their students and their principals. 
 
 “You have to look at multiple indicators and multiple measures,” he said. “There’s been historically a push to way oversimplify what is very complex.” 
 
 House Republicans have repeatedly protested the Obama administration’s use of waivers as an end-run around Congress. 
 
 In a speech to the American Enterprise Institute this year, Representative John Kline, a Minnesota Republican and the chairman of the House Committee on Education and the Work Force, accused the administration of using waivers “in exchange for states adopting the policies he wants them to have.” 
 
 But education officials in the states that received waivers expressed relief from the pressure of the looming 2014 deadline. 
 
 “There was a general feeling that there were these goals that no one was ever going to meet,” said Kelli Gauthier, spokeswoman for the Tennessee Department of Education. “Now we have standards that are possible.” 
 
 Instead of labeling all struggling schools as failing, the waivers direct states to focus most attention on the bottom 5 percent of low-performing schools. “With the waiver we can focus on those schools that really need a lot of help,” said June Atkinson, North Carolina’s state superintendent of public schools.
– It's a milestone for No Child Left Behind, but not in a good way: More than half of the nation is now exempt. The White House issued waivers today to the 25th and 26th states, and another 10 are in the works, reports the New York Times. The exemptions come ahead of a 2014 deadline requiring all students to be proficient in math and reading. They also come close to making the hallmark of George W. Bush's education reform "essentially nullified," says the Times. Education chief Arne Duncan says the waivers are necessary while the administration works with Congress to rewrite the law, which critics say is too focused on test results, notes AP. "A strong, bipartisan reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act remains the best path forward in education reform, but as 26 states have now demonstrated, our kids can't wait any longer for Congress to act," said Duncan in a statement. A school superintendent in Maryland says the waivers don't do much to get away from standardized tests, however. “I have a lot of respect for Arne Duncan, but it’s just sort of moving around the chairs on the Titanic.”