It's report card time

Washington Post: Spring is testing time in the public schools, and this year the tests are being taken especially seriously. Since the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act in January 2002, the business of passing tests and meeting standards now matters to schools as much as it does to students. Schools that fail to meet state improvement targets are now, under the federal law, subject to real penalties, which should be good news for proponents of testing and standards at the state level. In a few states, however, these are precisely the people who are most critical of the way the legislation appears to be working in practice.
One such state is Virginia, where the Board of Education eight years ago adopted more rigorous academic standards. The measure was a series of tests known as the Standards of Learning (SOL), which gauged progress in reading, math, science, history and social studies. Resisted by many in the beginning, the SOL tests seem to have worked. According to Board of Education President Mark Christie, about 80 percent of third-graders passed the standard mathematics test last year, a rise of 17 percent in the past five years. African-American children improved by 25 percent.
Federal shortcomings
But is the federal legislation helping or harming this progress? Meeting the federal goal of a 100 percent student "proficiency" within 12 years will be harder for those states that have established high standards, such as Virginia, Massachusetts and North Carolina. Some states, such as Texas, have already changed their standards, perhaps to ensure that their schools are not labeled "failing." Some surely will be tempted to keep standards low so as to avoid failure altogether.
School administrators are also grappling with other irrationalities built into the system. States are required, for example, to bring all non-English-speaking children up to the same standards as children who are proficient in English. Yet once they are proficient in English, these children no longer count as being non-English-speaking and are tested in a different category -- so there will be no demonstrable improvement. The law also neglects to make distinctions between schools that fail in every category and schools that miss the targets by a small margin in a single category.
More is needed
This is a law that will work, in practice, only as a part of a larger political process. States that set low standards must know they will be criticized by an informed public that knows standards are higher elsewhere. If a school is called a "failure," that label ought to provoke a crisis and an investigation into the problem. If it does not -- and if too many good schools, or all schools, fall into that category -- the label will become meaningless over time.
Like all pieces of new legislation, the No Child Left Behind Act requires adjustments. The idea behind it is still the right one. But before another school year is over, Congress must also ensure that it is actually improving schools.