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WASHINGTON (AP) -- With penalties looming for poorly performing schools, state legislators on Wednesday discussed how to cope with the financial burdens and testing requirements created by President Bush's education overhaul. The list of complaints was long, the debates over them longer. Tensions sometimes ran high in informal discussions with Bush administration officials and advocacy groups at the gathering of the National Conference of State Legislatures.

"I find it difficult to comprehend how you reach 100 percent proficiency," said Kansas state Sen. John Vratil. The Republican sharply questioned the law's goals of ensuring that all students meet new standards by 2014, particularly when it comes to students with developmental disabilities or poor English skills.

"We're very serious when we say all kids," said Education Department assistant secretary Laurie Rich, correcting participants who said the law was simply aiming to raise goals, not necessarily bring all children to those standards.

Over three days, lawmakers are dealing with education issues, including the federal Head Start program and state lawsuits over adequate school funding, and addressing topics such as energy and air pollution and telemarketing.

The law aims to improve teaching and student performance with a reliance on testing and penalties for schools whose students fail to meet goals. Schools may be required to let students transfer to other schools, provide private tutoring, or in cases of repeated failures, let the state take over.

Parents also are to get more information and are being given the option of moving their children out of a bad school.

Meeting demands of the law

But some lawmakers, including Utah state Rep. Kory Holdaway, a Republican and a special education teacher who heads the conference's education committee, said the law is so flawed that Congress needs to change it already.

On Tuesday, the administration responded to a top state concern, easing requirements that students in special education classes must test as well as the general school population.

Education Undersecretary Eugene Hickok said that accommodation showed that the government is listening to the states and willing to make changes. But going back to Congress would likely doom the reform effort, he said.

"A lot of the people who say they believe in this, they really don't want to see it changed," he said. "They're really people who want to amend the law to kill it."

Many lawmakers said there is not enough federal support to pay for the demands the law places on the states.

The federal government so far has increased K-12 spending by $7.8 billion, but that only amounts to a 1 percent increase in all the money -- local, state and federal -- spent on primary education, said David Shreve, an education expert with the conference.

But that increase requires states to use the money to help all school children, while earlier federal money focused on the nearly one-third of students nationwide considered economically disadvantaged, Shreve said. The money is still targeted to the same needy children, but it aims to "lift all boats," Rich said.

Some states and school districts are considering changing their own curriculums to meet the demands of the law. Some Mississippi school districts have eliminated recess, devoting the resources to academics to adapt to the testing standards.

States are also beginning to prepare for penalties. Thirty-eight schools in Massachusetts will need "corrective action," state officials said. In New Jersey, districts have sent letters to parents warning them that their children's teachers did not meet requirements set by the law.

"This is the critical year," said Alaska Sen. Johnny Ellis, a Democrat. He said the law, besides shortchanging the states on money, also ignored the vastly different demands on rural states like his.