Mixed Grades in a New Education Report

It wasn't supposed to work this way. When the No Child Left Behind legislation was passed in 2001 it required schools to ensure that all students reach proficiency in reading and math by 2013. Schools where children fail to reach grade level in those subjects face penalties. Hundreds of millions of federal dollars went to support reading instruction in poor schools in the early years. The idea was that children who were exposed to the right kind of reading instruction, and plenty of it, would "get the basics" and then go on to show sustained gains in achievement as they matured. And while that theory appears to hold true with mathematics, schoolchildren don't seem to be building on their success in reading. If we want to see sustained gains in reading, experts suggest, the reach of the already controversial law may need to be extended—forcing middle-school teachers to put the same kind of focus on reading as teachers have in elementary schools.

Which would be fine with Spellings. Last week she traveled across the Midwest on a tour bus painted school-bus yellow, drumming up support for No Child Left Behind from parents, teachers, principals and business leaders. The Department of Education data supports the notion that the law is closing the achievement gap, she says.

"Is it a perfect law?" she asks. "No. Can we improve it? Yes, we can. But we can't back away."

Administrators from poor schools like Watterson-Lake in Cleveland, which is charged with educating the children from a poor community in a ravaged city, say that No Child Left Behind—and the high-stakes testing that comes along with the state testing, is helping. Teachers understand what material they're responsible for covering in the classroom, and rigid standards force them to intervene quickly when a student begins to struggle. "Yes, testing is a huge part of our curriculum. Yes, we teach to the test," says principal Caren Geissinger. "But I don't have negative feelings about that. I think we do a better job of educating kids. Ten years ago you couldn't ask kids about the function of government or the names of the presidents. They didn't know. Now Ohio demands we teach social studies, and you better believe it, all our kids know it!"

The only thing that will stop the controversy, though, would be a straight-A report card for the nation. And that, it seems, is far in the future.

© 2007