Education reset: the next version of No Child Left Behind is not going to happen without state lawmakers demanding a bigger say.

• Author: Boulard, Garry
• Position: NCLB - Cover story

Rodney Lafon has a problem with the No Child Left Behind Act. "When you compare the test results from one group of 5th graders to another group, it ends up not being fair to the kids or teachers or schools," says the superintendent of the St. Charles Parish public school system in southern Louisiana.

It would make more sense if "we looked at the kids as they start in kindergarten and then track them in each successive grade so that we can see if we are truly offering value-added education."

Lafon is hardly alone.

The act, the most sweeping extension of federal authority over both the states and local school boards in history, was signed into law by then-President Bush in 2002. It's been controversial ever since.

"Educators across the country have for a long time had a wide variety of problems and complaints with the law," says Jack Jennings, the president of the Center on Education Policy. "And because it has been such sweeping legislation, there are plenty of things to complain about.

"But at the same time, almost everyone agrees that NCLB has been good in the sense that it has given so much attention to students who are struggling, such as poor, minority and disabled students."

ACHIEVING ACCOUNTABILITY

The act's accountability provisions are perhaps its most controversial aspect, Jennings says.

It was a reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, a component of Lyndon Johnson's 1960s war on poverty, and was renewed every four to six years in the 1970s, '80s and '90s, often under a new and different title.

Bush, who had earlier criticized what he described as "the soft bigotry of low expectations," came to the issue of education reform when he was the governor of Texas in the late 1990s. He promoted the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills exams, which tested all third to eighth grade students in the state and showed steadily improving scores, particularly among Hispanic and African-American students.

Key requirements of the act, currently up for reauthorization, include:

* Testing all students in grades three through eight and every year once in high school.

* Requiring schools receiving federal funds for disadvantaged students and schools with a certain percentage of low-income students to make progress in test scores.

* Putting any school failing to make "adequate yearly progress" on a "failing schools" list, giving parents the option of sending their children to better-performing schools in the same district.

"There is no doubt that NCLB exposed some areas that we needed to look at more seriously, particularly from the standpoint of whether or not we were leaving certain groups behind," says West Virginia Senator Robert Plymale, noting that the required tests revealed long-standing problems among minority and poor students that had not been previously addressed nationally.

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"It shined a bright light on many of those areas, and there is no doubt about it, that was a good thing," says Plymale, chair of the Senate Education Committee. "But the idea of trying to obtain a 100 percent proficiency with every student, in my view, was always unrealistic and may have forced teachers to become preoccupied with students doing well on those tests to the detriment of everything else."

Kansas...