An education rebellion is under way from Utah to Connecticut.

Three years after the passage of President Bush's controversial education reform known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the law is facing its most significant challenges yet - and they're coming in the courts, state legislatures, and local education departments.

Connecticut has announced it's suing the US Department of Education, claiming the law mandates changes without giving the funding to carry them out. The education commissioner in Texas unilaterally decided Washington's requirements were flawed, and she simply disregarded part of them - a kind of civil disobedience.

And Tuesday, Utah, the state that gave Mr. Bush his biggest win last November, is about to provide the most stinging rebuke yet to NCLB. In a special session, the state Senate is expected to pass overwhelmingly a bill to ensure that in a conflict between state and federal education regulations, Utah's rules will trump Washington's dictates. The House has already passed the bill, and if the Senate does as well, Utah is putting at risk $120 million it receives in federal education aid.

"The paramount question is who runs this show: Is it state and local government or Washington?" says state Sen. Thomas Hatch (R). "Are we going to let the federal government contribute a very small percentage of the education budget and dictate what we can or cannot do, or are we going to maintain control at the local level?"

The local rebellions come on the heels of an announcement by US Education Secretary Margaret Spellings that the department intends to exercise more flexibility than under her predecessor in addressing states' concerns about the law. NCLB requires annual testing in Grades 3 to 8 and sets out penalties for schools that fail to show "adequate yearly progress." In making the announcement, however, Secretary Spellings said there were certain "bright lines of the statute," such as reporting annual testing results by student subgroups, that "are not up for negotiation." This led some frustrated state officials like Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal to refer to any new flexibility as "more rhetoric than reality."

Historically, there's always been tension between states and federal government on education reform. When President Clinton tried to implement new standards, he also met resistance, often from Democratic governors. Now Bush finds himself facing similar concerns from some Republican governors, including Connecticut Gov. Jodi Rell.

Yet the heightened frustrations are also coming at a time when most states are reporting some success in raising test scores. While they insist that's in part because of state reforms put in place before NCLB became law, they do acknowledge it's had some positive effect.

"But they also see two big problems with the law: its rigid rules and lack of help for schools that have been identified as not doing well," says Jack Jennings, executive director of the nonpartisan Center on Education Policy in Washington, which has done the most extensive studies yet of the impact of NCLB. "The law is good at identifying them, but the money isn't there to help them."

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