The National Conference of State Legislatures, which is meeting in New Orleans this week, has added a word to describe the No Child Left Behind Act, further showing how the group feels about the federal accountability law.

“Coercive.”

The official NCSL policy on the federal role in elementary and secondary education, amended this morning to include that word, now urges Congress to adopt incentive-based programs versus the “coercive, punitive system at the heart of NCLB.”

That amendment this morning came from South Dakota state Sen. Ed Olson, a Republican, who was sticking up for his friends in Utah, who unsuccessfully tried to reject No Child Left Behind in 2004, which would have cost them $103 million in federal funds.