Scientific Method?

New 2005 NAEP science scores came out today. A familiar pattern -- elementary school scores up since the last test in 2000, middle and high school scores steady. But the high school scores are down from 1996, which is obviously cause for much concern. That said, this--per today's NYTimes--really doesn't make any sense at all:

Some teachers blamed the decreasing amount of time devoted to science in schools, in part because of the No Child Left Behind Law, whose requirements for annual testing in reading and math during the elementary grades have led many schools to decrease the time spent on science or to abandon its teaching altogether.

"Overall interest in science is down," said P. John Whitsett, a physics teacher at Fond du Lac High School in Wisconsin, who has taught physics and chemistry for 36 years. "When kids are given the opportunity to do science in elementary school, it excites them. But when the elementary and middle schools neglect science because of their focus on math and reading, it turns them off, and that disinterest carries on into high school."

So, NCLB has supposedly forced elementary schools to focus on reading and math and "abandon" science, so much so that elementary school science scores have gone--up? The fourth graders who took the NAEP science exam in 2005 have been living under NCLB for most of their academic careers, and their scores were the only ones that increased, at a statistically significant level to boot.

2005 12th graders, by contrast, entered high school in 2001, which means they took their one and only NCLB test just as the law's provisions were coming into effect, and long before they might have been subject to the allegedly disinteresting effects of curricular narrowing in elementary school.

If anything, these numbers support exactly the opposite conclusion: that focusing on getting all students up to speed in reading and math results in higher science scores, but current 12th graders suffered from the lack of that focus in the early grades.

Shouldn't these anti-NCLB criticisms be a little more, I don't know--scientific?