Columnist Diane Ravitch, in her latest offering on the Huffington Post, outlines what needs to be done to improve the federal No Child Left Behind law.
While she sees the need for national standards and annual testing, she favors allowing the states to devise their own remedies:
First, the federal government should establish national standards in basic academic subjects (reading, mathematics, science, and history). Second, it should annually administer national examinations in those subjects. Third, it should make the results available to states and school districts.
It should be left to the states to decide which actions to take in response to this information. The states, working with the school districts, should decide which combination of rewards and sanctions will improve student achievement.
We should, in this instance, use the states as laboratories of democracy. Since we do not know which rewards and sanctions will have the most salutary effects, we need to let the states work with educators to try different approaches. When there is a clear pattern, other states and districts will learn from the experiences of others who are successful as well as those that are not.
One of the benefits of this approach is that the states will be relieved of the cost and burden of testing, as the whole cost and burden will shift to the federal government. Another benefit will be that all of the red tape and mandates associated with NCLB will disappear overnight.
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