No Child Left Behind and all similar policies were made in good faith with good intent, but few of their many consequences have been good ones.
The focus on testing and testing strategies to the exclusion of learning for its own right encourages the quick memorization of facts for a short term goal. What it does NOT do is encourage long-term knowledge retention.
The continuing drive to drop any classes or class instruction that doesn't deal with hard data leave students with no particular reason to think they should retain this knowledge in the first place. A thousand dry facts about the Gettysburg Address, handed to students without the narrative and context to understand why they should be aware of it, does not encourage true learning.