The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, President George W.

Bush's education-
reform bill, was signed into law on Jan. 8, 2002. By all accounts, it is the most
sweeping education-reform legislation since 1965, when President Lyndon B.
Johnson passed his landmark Elementary and Secondary Education Act.
(Technically, the new bill is a reauthorization and revision of that 1965
legislation.) It dramatically increases the role of the federal government in
guaranteeing the quality of public education for all children in the United States -
- with an emphasis on increased funding for poor school districts, higher
achievement for poor and minority students, and new measures to hold schools
accountable for their students' progress -- and in the process dramatically
expands the role of standardized testing in American public education, requiring
that students in grades 3 through 8 be tested every year in reading and math.
The debate over the bill's testing and accountability provisions centered on such
questions as whether states would maintain control over their own standards and
tests, how the new mandates would be funded, how test results would be
reported, where the bar would be set for defining proficiency and adequate
progress, how schools would be held accountable, and whether states' test scores
would be compared against an independent national benchmark, the National
Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).
Here is a brief summary of how the final legislation came out on these issues,
followed by links to the Education Department and House Committee websites
for more detailed information, and to selected articles analyzing the outcome of
the bill.
Standards and Testing
The centerpiece of the bill is the requirement that states develop and implement
"challenging" academic standards in reading and math, set annual statewide
progress objectives to ensure that all groups of students reach proficiency within
12 years, and then test children annually in grades 3 through 8, in reading and
math, to measure their progress. The bill specifically prohibits any "national
testing" or "federally controlled curriculum." It is up to the states to select and/or
design their own tests, and to make sure that the tests are aligned with the state
curriculum standards. States will receive federal funds to help develop their tests,
and a "trigger mechanism" specifies that states are not required to develop the
reading and math tests for grades 3-8 if the federal government fails to provide
the necessary funding.
Reporting Results
The test results will be made public in annual "report cards" on how schools are
performing and how states are progressing overall toward their proficiency
objectives. To help ensure that all groups of students are progressing at an
adequate rate, the test results must be broken out and reported according to
poverty, race, ethnicity, disability, and limited English proficiency. This is
known as "disaggregation of data," and is intended to prevent schools from
lumping test results together in an overall average for the school, effectively
hiding the achievement gaps between groups of students.
Adequate Yearly Progress and Accountability
States will have until the 2005-06 school year to develop and implement their
tests. Once in place, schools and districts will be required to show "adequate
yearly progress" [A.Y.P.] toward their statewide objectives -- that is, they must
demonstrate (through their test scores) that they are on course to reach 100
percent proficiency for all groups of students within 12 years. The states
themselves decide what is proficient and what is an adequate rate of progress for
each group. Those schools that fall behind may be subject to various "school
improvement," "corrective action," or "restructuring" measures imposed by the
state. Underperforming schools may avoid such measures if they can demonstrate
a 10 percent reduction in the number of students that are not meeting the annual
proficiency goals.
An Independent Benchmark
Each state's test results will also be compared against an independent benchmark
called the National Assessement of Educational Progress (NAEP), which will be
given to a small sample of each state's 4th and 8th-grade students in reading and
math every other year. This provision, known as "NAEP comparability," is
supposed to ensure that states are not setting the bar too low on their standards
and tests. That is, if a state shows progress on its statewide test results but does
not show comparable progress on the NAEP, it would suggest that the state's
standards and tests are not challenging enough. The final legislation, however,
does not provide for any penalties if a state's test scores fall behind relative to its
NAEP results, but merely requires that the comparative results will be made
public.