Measure for measure: the president's school reform law rests on the belief that its high-stakes tests are fair and accurate. But the Bush aide who designed the law has his doubts. And the Dallas schools have a better way.

• Author: Toch, Thomas
• Position: Sandy Kress

If any school should be a poster child for President Bush's signature education reform, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), it's Herbert Marcus Elementary School. The inner-city Dallas, Texas, school is exactly the kind that the law was designed to improve. It's a shabby, overcrowded place on the edge of a grim industrial zone, where lunch starts at 10 a.m. to handle the school's 1,140 students, nearly all of whom live in poverty, two-thirds of whom don't speak English as a first language, and whose parents have on average a 7th-grade education.

But the school has done just about everything right in recent years. Principal Conce Rodriguez has introduced reforms that require students to wear uniforms and teachers to submit weekly progress reports on every student in every subject. There's an expanded pre-kindergarten program, teacher-attendance incentives, and a big tutoring project. Rodriguez even hired a "community liaison," who has expanded the school's PTA membership to 700, the largest in Dallas. On a typical day, there are 50 parents volunteering at the school. Marcus' 97 percent student attendance rate is one of the highest in the city.

The changes at Marcus have paid dividends in the classroom. Under NCLB, the Dallas schools must test kids in reading and math every year between 3rd and 8th grade, and under Dallas' system of rating those test results, Marcus placed 19th out of the city's 206 schools, a significant accomplishment for a school with such difficult demographics. Marcus produced six more months of learning in a single school year than some other Dallas schools with equally disadvantaged students.

But that's Dallas' system of rating schools. The state of Texas, as required by NCLB, reads the scores differently. Under that federally-mandated rating, Marcus fares much worse--it gets a middling "acceptable" score, which places it only 76th in the city. That's one step away from being labeled failing under NCLB.

The discrepancy isn't the product of fuzzy math. It's the result of competing ideas about how to use test results. NCLB's strategy is to cast a bright light on student performance and impose reforms on schools that don't measure up. To do this, it mandates that student populations be judged once a year against a fixed state standard, while Dallas measures changes in individual student performance from one year to the next.

Other Dallas schools are finding themselves similarly penalized by NCLB. Schools ranked 2nd, 5th, 8th, and 16th under the city's rating system were ranked 94th, 77th, 83rd, and 107th in the Texas NCLB regime. At the same time, the school that placed 3rd under the state system was ranked 25th under Dallas'.

The sense that Texas' NCLB ratings are unfair has demoralized the staff at schools like Marcus. Several of Rodriguez's veteran teachers have left in frustration for wealthy suburban school districts where they felt their achievements would be more fairly recognized, staff members at Marcus say. Keeping good teachers 'is always a struggle for inner-city schools, and in many cases, NCLB has made things worse.

Since shortly after its passage, the law has been under heavy attack--from congressional Democrats who say the administration hasn't invested the money it promised to implement the law, from Republican state legislators who resent the federal intrusion, and from teacher union leaders who never liked test-based accountability in the first place. But there have been other, less widely publicized, indictments of NCLB from parents, teachers, and principals who support high-stakes testing but see how NCLB is playing out in the classroom.

Educators in impoverished neighborhoods argue that the law's criteria for school success don't sufficiently take into account of how immensely far behind many of their students are when they start school. Educators and parents in affluent communities, where students routinely score above state standards, have a different complaint: that the NCLB accountability system is leading to a dumbing down of their schools' curricula. Many testing experts, meanwhile, point out that NCLB creates a host of perverse incentives, including encouraging states to set their academic standards low to reduce the number of their schools labeled "failing" under the law--the opposite of what NCLB's authors intended.

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings has...