Citizens for Effective Schools, Inc. (CES) is a non-partisan, non-profit organization of citizens committed to attaining the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) goal of academic proficiency for virtually all public school students, regardless of race, ethnicity or income.  CES supports conditioning provision of federal funding under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) (currently called "NCLB") on states' and localities': adopting high standards; conducting regular testing; disaggregating results for student subgroups; and publicly reporting results for each school.

But, as shown by fifteen years' combined experience under NCLB and the states' "standards, assessment and accountability" laws on which NCLB was modeled, sanctions-based accountability systems do not make the grade.  Notwithstanding these mandates, about:

• 70% of our approximately 50 million public school students are still below “Proficiency” in reading and 65% below it in math, as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress. (That is, tens of millions of students lack sufficient knowledge and skills in those subjects to satisfy the national goal at their grade levels);
• 85% of our 10 million Hispanic and 8 million black students lack “Proficiency” in reading, with about 87% of black students and 82% of Hispanic students lacking “Proficiency” in math;
• 10 million low income students (46% of such students) lack even “Basic” skills at their respective grade levels in reading and 7 million low income students (37%) lack such skills in math. (That is, they lack even partial mastery of these critical subjects.)

(For example, fourth graders below "Basic" in math cannot "use basic facts to perform simple computations with whole numbers." Eighth graders below "Proficiency" in reading cannot "give details and examples to support themes that they identify" in eighth grade literature.)

NCLB's accountability scheme consists principally of penalizing, with increasingly severe interventions, schools that fail to sufficiently raise test scores.  This has not resulted in dramatically improving student learning.  Moreover, it has resulted in:

• narrowing the curriculum to focus on test taking;
• excluding low-performing students from testing and reporting; and
• other manipulations by local and state school systems to minimize the number of schools subject to sanctions.

Call to everyone concerned about the future of American education:

Instead of continuing to sanction schools for failing to raise test scores, ESEA should lead states and localities to make the structural changes needed to greatly improve learning and then hold them accountable for implementing those changes.

Yet, leading NCLB sponsors have indicated that they continue to support NCLB's general accountability scheme and favor having ESEA reenacted, with only relatively limited adjustments.

Unless concerned citizens step forward publicly now to demand fundamental changes in ESEA's remedial approach, we risk having NCLB's arbitrary Adequate Yearly Progress-based test score mandates generate increasing numbers of "failing" schools and destroy the public's confidence in the public schools.

We must speak out now to restructure NCLB's "accountability" scheme before ESEA is reauthorized!